Fanfics on AtProto#

Links:

• Background
• Infrastructure
  • Notes
  • Structure

Background#

This was an idea that sparked off a great discussion around decentralizing archives for fanfics and fan works. What if we could have archives that:

1. ... are censorship resistant,
2. ... are easy (and CHEAP) to host,
3. ... are easy to configure and extend,
4. ... have moderation tools built-in,
5. ... give users on both sides (authors AND readers) more ownership over their data,
6. ... AND have a cool sixth thing here!

I'm setting out to explore these questions by building a prototype of a fanfic archive on Astro and AtProto.

Infrastructure#

Notes#

AtProto, to my understanding, is made of multiple layers. There's:

1. The client (the actual site that displays data)
2. The PDS (the server that stores user's data)
3. The AppView (the thing that grabs only relevant data)
4. The Lexicon (the blueprint for data to be used in AppViews and clients)

... And probably more, and there's a lot of discussion around how user data ownership / censorship / etc gets handled on those layers.

In our case, we'll only worry about making the client and then get drafts of the lexicons from the community later.

Currently, I'm using these technologies:

• Astro
• Drizzle ORM
• Turso
• Unstorage

Mainly because: 1, Astro is a really well-documented web framework that's pretty approachable as someone who used to handwrite HTML pages; 2, SQLite / LibSQL are (to my knowledge) fairly cheap databases to run; and 3, Unstorage is pretty dead simple for setting up auth sessions from scratch.

Structure#

src/actions#

These hold actions that run every time a user wants to publish a new work or signs up for the archive.

src/assets#

This has images / libre font / .css files to be used stylistically throughout the site.

src/components#

These hold components that are reused throughout src/pages. Like PHP includes but in HTML and JavaScript (well, technically it's JSX).

src/lib/db#

This holds all the relevant database connecting code. This also contains the types for database tables.

src/pages#

These are the actual pages where data, user interactions, etc happen. So this would be more HTML/CSS/JavaScript-oriented.