Jonline

Jonline is an open-source, community-scale social network designed to be capable of "dumfederating" with other Jonline instances/communities, making sharing between local-size instances easy. All web-facing features in Jonline - the Tamagui/React app, the Flutter app, and Media endpoints - are written with easy-to-read AGPL code, localStorage (or system storage, for native Flutter apps), and neither set nor read cookies at all, ever. Thus, an unmodified Jonline server shouldn't need a cookie notice under the GDPR or CCPA. Moreover, any modified version of Jonline that does use cookies would violate the AGPL if the source weren't provided to users.

Meanwhile, in support of media creators/providers who might want to self-host Jonline for themselves or in a consortium (whether in lieu of or in addition to monolithic social media presence like YouTube or Twitch), Jonline's CORS support does still afford private media holders a basic way to control who can see their content. Further, better Media permission/visibility controls could definitely be added, should, say, video creators or streamers want to migrate to self-hosting using a Jonline instance as their decentralized video platform to charge for premium content.

The "dev" instance is up at Jonline.io (the Flutter app being at Jonline.io/flutter). Two "production" instances are also at BullCity.Social and OakCity.Social. Unless I'm doing some testing with Jonline.io, all three should be configured to be able to federate with one another (or, for clients to federate between them). For anyone curious, all three (along with their corresponding Postgres and MinIO) live on a single-box DigitalOcean K8s instance. Between the 3 Load Balancers, storage, and compute resources, it costs about $60/mo to run the 3 domains, though that cost can be brought closer to $40/mo. (All also keep their media and HTML/CSS/JS behind Cloudflare's free CDN.)

Images & Deployments

JBL (Jonline Balancer of Loads, the load balancer for Jonline) is a straightforward, pure Rust K8s-centric TCP/TLS load balancer in very early testing:

| Deployment | Purpose | Federation Settings | Links | Deployment Version | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------ | | Jonline.io | Flagship demo/informational site | BullCity.Social (pinned), OakCity.Social (pinned) | About, Flutter UI, Protocol Docs | Development | | BullCity.Social | Durham, NC Community Page | OakCity.Social (pinned) | About, Flutter UI, Protocol Docs | Production | | OakCity.Social | Raleigh, NC Community Page | BullCity.Social (pinned) | About, Flutter UI, Protocol Docs | Production |

• Jonline
  • Images & Deployments
  • What is Jonline?
    • Why Jonline vs. Mastodon/OpenSocial?
      • Jonline as a protocol vs. ActivityPub
    • Cost of Development
    • Cost of Operation
    • Why not Jonline?
  • Features Overview
    • Jonline Identifiers: Usernames, Group Names, and IDs
    • People, Followers and Friends
    • Groups and Memberships
    • Media
    • Posts
      • GroupPost
    • Events
    • Future Feature Roadmap
    • Dumfederation
    • Protocol Documentation
    • Project Components
      • Documentation
      • gRPC APIs
      • Architecture/Deployment Management
      • Rust Backend
      • Frontends
        • Web (Tamagui/React/Next.js) Frontend
        • Flutter Frontend (Deprecated/To Be Deleted Unless A Contributor Fixes It)
  • Quick deploy to your own cluster
    • Deployment management: domains and TLS certs; deploying multiple jonline instances to different K8s namespaces in the same cluster; and (yet-incomplete) integrated cross-namespace load balancing
  • Motivations
    • Scaling Social Software via Dumfederation

What is Jonline?

Broadly speaking, Jonline is something of an "internet philosophy." It's my (Jon's) philosophy. It's a generally anti-capitalist tech approach that has a few perhaps obvious opinions on everything from user data privacy expectations, to cost of servers, through CI/CD, the BE, API design, user expectations for transparent permissions/moderation/visibility on things like People, Media, Groups, Posts, and Events, etc. Conveniently, things that meet my (Jon's) requirements for these these things can be described as "Jonline CI/CD,", "Jonline API Design,", "Jonline Events," and so forth.

As a more traditional market product, Jonline is a network of, and a protocol for, social networks that meets my (Jon's) expectations of usability, transparency, and fairness. It's designed to scale as well as Mastodon or better, but really, it aims to be something more like Plex, but as a social network released under the AGPL (and also, Kubernetes/LetsEncrypt/CertManager-friendly). Use cases include:

• Neighborhoods, communities, or cities
• (Ex-)Coworkers wanting a private channel to chat
• Run/bike/etc. clubs
• App user groups
• Online game clans
• Board game groups
• D&D parties
• Local concert listings
• Event venue calendars

The core model of Jonline is that each of these communities is run as its own Jonline instance. Each of these instances and their data are literally owned by the organization (or a chosen "IT admin person" and/or "moderation team" for it). Finally, the same person's accounts on all of these instances can be federated (if the user chooses, and dependent upon server configurations and permissions, of course). Federation is simply a means to let, say, a user, Jeff, see their D&D DM also knows the guy from run club who left his wallet, even if Jeff and the DM are not friends on the run club network, but only if the DM chooses to federate their identity across both those networks.

One way to think of Jonline is as social media meets the email server model (I use Gmail, you use your ISP's email, we can still talk to each other), with a bit of the Li