EmbersPlatform / embers

A social platform built with Elixir and Phoenix Framework

A social platform built with Elixir and Phoenix Framework

Warning: the current frontend code is being refactored and it may break often. For instance, landing page is non-existent.Backend code requires refactoring, as many parts of it are messy/undocumented.

This was previously a spanish-only project, some parts may need to be translated to english. Email-related stuff may be broken.

About

Embers is a microblogging platform alternative to mainstream social networks. You can use it to follow friends and share anything you want: pictures, videos, text and links. It was born out of the idea of "can I build something like Twitter" and as a learning exercise, so there weren't clear goals from the start. However, it is an opportunity to build spaces for small communities that feel out of place in the more massive social networks.

Demo

You can find a running demo at http://embers.gigalixirapp.com/

Goals

• Work in low-end devices.
• Avoid tracking as much as possible.
• Not rely on users personal data, like real names, location, etc. The less personal data we store, the better.

Features

Real-time timeline

See what your friends post in real time in your home timeline.

Media attachments

Upload images and short webm/mp4 videos attached to your posts.

React to posts

Instead of just having a binary +1/-1 system, you can use one(or more!) of a set of predefined reactions, like love or sadness.

Save what you like

You can add the posts you like to your personal favorites list and keep them for later.

Tag your content

Add tags to your posts, either via #hashtags or with a dedicated interface(to avoid polluting images with hashtags).

Follow and block people and tags

You can follow people to see their posts in your timeline, you can follow tags too. You can also block them to never see them again.

Content warnings

A tag based content warning allows you to filter Not Safe For Work content.

Moderation tools

You can report posts that violate your Code of Conduct, moderators can remove infringing content, ban users, and manually add content warnings.

Requirements

• Elixir (and Erlang). Works fine with Elixir 1.11 and OTP 23.
• PostgreSQL
• NodeJS
• Google Recaptcha keys
• FFmpeg
• ImageMagick

If using docker-compose, only Google Recaptcha keys are needed.

Development with docker

You can use docker-compose to set up a development environment with docker by running docker-compose. After doing that, follow the steps listed in the Getting Started section.

Getting started

Backend

Before trying to compile Embers, a config/ENV.secret.exs file is needed. You can find an example file for the dev environment in the config folder.

• Get dependencies with mix deps.get
• Copy static files with cp -R assets/static priv.*
• Setup the database with mix ecto.setup. This will create the databse, run migrations and seed data.
• You can now run it with mix phx.server ot iex -S mix phx.server.

* This step is needed because in order to inline svg files in templates, phoenix_inline_svg needs them to be in priv/static, but svg files are also loaded by the frontend code. This should be addressed in the future.

Frontend

Source files for the frontend(js, scss, static files) live in the /assets folder.

• Install dependencies with npm install | yarn.
• Build it with npm run build | yarn build, or npm run dev | yarn dev to run in watch mode.

After running these steps, the app should be accessible from localhost:4000.

A default admin account is created with credentials admin:yayapapaya.

Building a release

You can build an OTP release for deployment by running the release.sh script. Built releases will be output to the artifacts folder.

Documentation

Documentation can be generated by running mix docs. After that, it will be available in the doc folder.

License

Copyright (C) 2020 [e-mail]

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.