Aardwolf
Aardwolf, building social communities with open software.
Welcome!
Greetings friend!
If you are unfamiliar with GitHub (nice to have you here!), the document you are reading currently is the main README.md, and serves as a general index for the Aardwolf Project.
Please feel free to look around, ask questions, and leave comments. We gladly welcome community participation while we grow, and expand.
Use the list below to jump to a specific section, or simply scroll down.
- What is Aardwolf?
- Who are we?
- What do we need?
- How can you get involved?
- Get in touch
- Find out more
- Buy us a coffee?
- License Info
What is Aardwolf?
Aardwolf is a platform for creating new social networks, connected across the web. While existing social media sites work to funnel the world into a single shared experience (and advertising marketplace), we recognize that we are all individuals with different identities and interests.
Our vision is to create a social-networking platform that mirrors the functionality of Facebook while also considering the needs of the community. We hope to be one of many federated applications working towards a better, friendlier, social Internet.
Who are we?
We are a group of friends that met on Mastodon to collaborate on building a better social networking application. Despite our busy lives we are all able to share our multitude of talents with one another to bring this project to life, one small contribution at a time. While the core group have years of development experience, several of them have not used Rust until this project. Others, such as Banjo, have never done any significant development work, but are able to take on other responsibilities such as project management, documentation, or even creating artwork (yes there is plenty of non-technical work that needs doing ;D).
Banjo is currently working as an Information Security Engineer, but his primary background is in computer hardware, and Linux system administration. He can usually be found elbows deep in some project or another, be it home DIY, planning or making beer/mead, fishing, or gaming. To date, Aardwolf is also the first development project he has ever managed, but he is having a lot of fun, and learning a heck of a lot about how web applications get built. Someday he hopes to have enough "free time" to go back to learning Rust.
What do we need?
There are a lot of moving pieces right now, but this list should remain relatively stable. In -all- cases we are NOT looking for expert developers. Even if you are new to any of the topics below that's okay! For a lot of us this is a learning experience, and we like to help each other out. Do not be afraid to ask :)
ProTip: Working on a project is a great way to learn programming ;)
- People to help with Rust
- HTML/CSS folks that want to help with the Aardwolf Interface
- Designers/artists for the graphical bits (website layouts, color schemes, look-and-feel images)
- Documentation help. Proofreading, organization, update wiki, add more things
- Docker containers/VM's. At one time we'd considered building ready-to-deploy development environments to help speed up the process for those that wanted/needed it.
- PostgreSQL database admins. Since Postgres is our current DB of choice, it'd be nice to make sure that we're doing things right ;)
- User inputs. What would you like to see in a Facebook replacement?
Get involved
If you think you can help in any of the areas listed above (and we bet you can) or in any of the many areas that we haven't yet thought of (and here we're sure you can) then please check out our contributors' guidelines and our roadmap.
Please note that it's very important to us that we maintain a positive and supportive environment for everyone who wants to participate. When you join us we ask that you follow our [code of conduct] (https://github.com/BanjoFox/aardwolf/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md) in all interactions both on and offline.
Contact Us
Lately we have been hanging out on Matrix chat which is #aardwolf-discussion:matrix.org, and doing almost all of our discussion there.
If you would like to follow us on Mastodon you may do so using @aardwolf@glitch.social.
We also have a forum WeAreSocial.tech (you can login with your GitHub account), and a mailing list, both of which have been super quiet.
If you would like to get in touch with the project lead (Banjo), please checkout his homepage at banjo.codes for a long list of contact methods.
Find out more
- Contributor's guidelines
- Hackers Guide to Aardwolf
- Roadmap
- Open Canvass(WIP)
- Building, and installation guide
Donations
If you like what we are doing but would prefer to provide support by keeping our coffee mugs full we have set up a LiberaPay site. Everyone on the core team gets an equal stake (Except for Banjo who is opting-out of donations at this time). liberapay.com/Aardwolf
License
All Aardwolf software is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License License: AGPL v3(http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0)