Untitled Social Media Consumption Project

(last updated 2023-06-11)

This is the main repository for USMCP, formerly "Witch Watch", formerly "What2.Watch", etc. etc. USMCP is intended to primarily support the following things as an end user:

• keep track of things you want to watch, eg, TV shows, movies, videos, etc.

• including type of thing, whether or not it's private, whether you watched it already, etc.

• keep track of people you want to watch those things with
• easy to take all your data with you, no lock-in

As an operator, it's meant to be as simple as possible:

• single binary that can be copied and deployed easily
• local database (sqlite) and associated files, easily copied and inspected
• pervasive use of universally unique IDs allows simple merges from other instances

As a developer, it's meant to be easy to work on:

• Pure Rust backend

• Axum with Tokio for async http routing
• SQLx for talking with the database
• Askama for templates
• Tantivy for full and fuzzy text searching (PLANNED)

• Simple front end

• currently unstyled hand-written HTML with no javascript!
• barely there!
• a good place for contributing!

Overview of the code

Rust

Like most Rust projects, it's broken up into at least two distinct crates, a bin crate that acts as a thin veneer over and runner for the main entry point inside the lib crate. The lib crate exposes a couple public functions and datastructures used in the bin crate and in testing, but otherwise mostly brings some lib-crate-wide types into the crate:: scope and defines the app method that returns an Axum::Router, and currently has all the HTTP route declarations.

The full src directory currently looks like:

src
├── db.rs
├── generic_handlers.rs
├── lib.rs
├── login.rs
├── main.rs
├── signup.rs
├── templates.rs
├── test_utils.rs
├── users.rs
├── util.rs
└── watches
    ├── handlers.rs
    ├── mod.rs
    └── templates.rs

The simple modules (that is, ones that are a single file without anything from submodules being exposed to anywhere else outside themselves) are all under src/:

• db.rs: interfacing with sqlite (this has an inlined external crate for managing login sessions with sqlite, which takes up most of the lines in the file, but should be considered mostly external)
• generic_handlers.rs: callback definitions for serving things like redirects to /
• login.rs: error types and handlers for login/logout routes
• signup.rs: error and response types, and handlers, for signup route
• templates.rs: Askama templates for the simple modules
• users.rs: definitions and trait implementations for Users
• util.rs: misc useful functions

Tests for those modules are kept as submodules inside them.

Compound modules, those that are a mod.rs file inside a subdirectory of src/, will broadly follow the example of src/watches/:

• watches/mod.rs: data types and impls for the thing to watch (a Watch)
• watches/templates.rs: Askama templates for Watch-related pages and objects
• watches/handelers.rs: callbacks and their error types for handling requests to Watch-related routes

Tests for each are kept as submodules inside each submodule, as with the simple modules.

In general, all templates will be available directly under the crate:: scope, as you can see in the use statements in lib.rs, but handlers are not.

Non-Rust

At the project root, next to the src/ directory, are two other directories:

• migrations/: SQL files that define the schemas and add things like indexs and triggers
• templates/: HTML templates used by one or more Askama templates to control presentation

It's likely that there will be css/ and javascript directories in the future. Likewise code for helping with deploying or monitoring.

Development goals

Currently, I think the backend is 40-60% "complete", where 100% would mean that all use cases outlined at the top are working. The front end is approximately unstarted.

The current development priorities are, in order from most to least important,

• finishing the watches module, allowing adding things to watch to the system and to your own watchlist
• more front-end templates to support the watches operations
• full-text-search with Tantivy

• realistically, you need this as soon as you can start adding data to it

After that, it will be a focus on the front end, and possibly a Flutter/Dart app for mobile. For the web client, I'm leaning toward something like HTMx but am not against other lightweight javascript solutions.

And finally, things like commandline tools to do things like reset passwords or delete accounts, or otherwise interact with the database outside of the main app. And then, OAuth or OIDC support. Down the line, I want to experiment with implementing Backchannel for decentralized and social identity and supporting that inside this.