fedireads

Social reading and reviewing, decentralized with ActivityPub

Setting up the developer environment

You will need postgres installed and running on your computer.

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
createdb fedireads

Create the psql user in psql fedireads:

CREATE ROLE fedireads WITH LOGIN PASSWORD 'fedireads';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE fedireads TO fedireads;

Initialize the database (this will also delete and re-create the migrations, which is not a good idea for the long term but it's what I'm doing right now).

./rebuilddb.sh

This creates two users, mouse with password password123 and rat with password ratword.

And go to the app at localhost:8000

For most testing, you'll want to use ngrok. Remember to set the DOMAIN in settings.py to your ngrok domain.

Structure

All the url routing is in fedireads/urls.py. This includes the application views (your home page, user page, book page, etc), application endpoints (things that happen when you click buttons), and federation api endpoints (inboxes, outboxes, webfinger, etc).

The application views and actions are in fedireads/views.py. The internal actions call api handlers which deal with federating content. Outgoing messages (any action done by a user that is federated out), as well as outboxes, live in fedireads/outgoing.py, and all handlers for incoming messages, as well as inboxes and webfinger, live in fedireads/incoming.py. Misc api functions live in fedireads/api.py, which is probably not a good name for that file.

Connection to openlibrary.org to get book data is handled in fedireads/openlibrary.py.

The UI is all django templates because I tried to install jinja2 and couldn't get it working so I gave up. It'd be nice to have jinja2 for macros, so maybe I'll try again some day. You can replace it with a complex javascript framework over my dead body mild objections.

Thoughts and considerations

What even are books

The most complex part of this is knowing what books are which and who authors are. Right now I'm only using openlibrary.org as a single, canonical source of truth for books, works, and authors. But it may be that user should be able to import books that aren't in openlibrary, which, that's hard. So there's room to wonder if the openlibrary work key is indeed how a work should be identified.

The key needs to be universal (or at least universally comprehensible) across all fedireads servers, which is why I'm using an external identifier controlled by someone else.

Explain "review"

There's no actual reason to be beholden to simple 5 star reviews with a text body. Are there other ways of thinking about a review that could be represented in a database?