This made me think about if I should use Drupal as backend only or as full monolith.

Or if I should switch to Nuxt and a microservice architectural approach.

Or if I should just stick with the Symfony base I had before setting up the Drupal repo.

One promise from my side on this topic: If this project can be monetized and I’m able to found a company, I will always be open about our salaries.

Maybe I’ll found an open startup where everything is open, every contract, etc. but that’s just a thought for now.

❓Will the code be open source?

❗️Yes! Once the first release is ready, I will be publishing all the code for everyone to analyze.

I also will create a license that allows you to use the code for your own version of a responsible social platform.

❓Everyone is welcome?

❗️Everyone except the intolerant. I want to build a safe space for every person that respects other human beings. 🫶🏼

❓What does AI free mean?

❗️In the age of AI which we are now I use AI to assist with coding for smaller tasks like autocompletion or writing small pieces of the docs.

I will not use any form of AI to generate content, user accounts or profiles. You will never see AI generated content.

❓What does „democracy first“ mean?

❗️Every important decision will be trialed by all users which means you always have a voice!

Plus you can always submit your ideas which will be evaluated. There are no bad ideas and every single idea will be discussed.

❓Why social?

❗️Social Media has been social when it became popular around 2010 but after the companies discovered they can sell data for profit it all just became a big money printing machine to make single individuals rich as fuck.

I want to bring this back. Social media should be social again.

❓Why 2030?

❗️I want to take my time to create not just a great platform but also to develop it on a solid base. I don’t just want to throw out features and functions, I want to craft them carefully and question well known patterns.

Plus I have a full time job and to this day I’m doing this alone.

I plan this phase to finish until January 1st 2026 btw, let’s hope I get this 😅

So, the next steps are:
- Setting up a fresh Drupal installation
- installing modules and themes I already know I need
- create a subtheme of bootstrap5 which I can modify to my needs
- set up QA tools like phpcs, phpstan, phpunit, etc
- set up deployment

I’m seriously thrilled 🤩

Oh! Another great point for future versions (for example if I switch to a decoupled frontend): Drupal comes with a JSON:API compliant API already which works just great

Believe me when I say, Dries Buytaert and the whole team and all the contributors of #Drupal did a great job building such an amazing system.

I know what I’m doing.

One argument for this decision, and I must admit this is a pretty personal point, is that working with Drupal just feels like coming home.

As I said, I have experience with it. The truth is also that I worked with Drupal for the most of the time in my career.

Content management and things like internationalization and email templating (latter over module). Plus I can use the bootstrap5 theme as starting point without the need of thinking long about the design for now.

I already have several years of experience with Drupal and I definitely would say

It’s built. The common best practices like phpstan, psalm and phpunit have been followed but something still feels just off about that.

So I decided to stick with #Drupal for at least the MVP version. Drupal suits very good for it because it already provides user management,

If you have an idea, let me know 🙏

I also could use the verification options we have with the German IDs. But unless I want to use a third party integration for that I’d need to build my own integration. Do I want that? No, not after I already worked with the ELSTER API 😂