I started to build Gurlic as a way to post my thoughts.
Here are a few examples: https://gurlic.com/bob/dont-laugh https://gurlic.com/plato/ion?theme=minimal https://gurlic.com/homer/the-odyssey-book-i?theme=pudding https://gurlic.com/raw/next-stop-immortality?theme=naked
There is a minimal editor for writing longform/articles, with a fair bit of customization, theme options, including custom CSS, adding co-authors etc.
User can also post short posts including media, attachments, reviews, polls and so on. Some examples:
https://gurlic.com/raw/post/320442840570134533 https://gurlic.com/bob/post/lf1Gb5wFYb6A https://gurlic.com/davinci/post/hjWoniPoYNDK etc...
These posts are brought together in profiles which can be customized: https://gurlic.com/raw https://gurlic.com/bob https://gurlic.com/haxor
Profiles can be at subdomains too: https://raw.gurlic.com
Or domains: https://bob.monster
Communities -----------
Gurlic has a thing called a "bread" which is a collection of posts. The most common type of bread is a community, which is sort of like a subreddit or a forum. These are fairly minimal now, but have customization options, mods/admins and so on. Here are a few examples:
https://gurlic.com/music https://gurlic.com/programming https://gurlic.com/space
Communities can be nested:
https://gurlic.com/music/jazz https://gurlic.com/music/jazz/fusion
They can be found at subdomains too, like so: https://music.gurlic.com https://music.gurlic.com/jazz https://music.gurlic.com/jazz/fusion
Or domains: https://gurlic.space
Galleries ---------
A gallery is just another type of bread, but accepts image posts only. Like this:
They can be at subdomains too: https://art.gurlic.com
Or domains: https://gurlic.art
Publications ------------
Publications are yet another type of bread. These are for longform posts only. Here's one: https://gurlic.com/classics
And a post from it: https://gurlic.com/classics/the-iliad-book-ii
These can be at domains too: https://classics.wtf
And a post: https://classics.wtf/the-odyssey-book-iii
Nested breads don't have to be the same type, so you could have a gallery under a community, or some other combination. Like this: https://gurlic.com/art/discussion https://gurlic.com/programming/memes
Other stuff -----------
Most posts can be tagged, marked NSFW, users can be @mentioned, there are #hashtags, all the usual modern amenities. Profiles and communities have RSS too, or should, last I checked.
Work in progress ----------------
I'm hoping to integrate matrix into the code as soon as I find more time to read/learn it and things like dendrite and hydrogen are stable enough. Until then, signed up users get a @username:gurlic.com account and there's a self-hosted version of the Riot/Element as https://gurlic.com/chat that I havent' had the time to play with yet. I'm guessing the usual matrix clients on desktop/phone can be used, but I haven't checked.
Short term goals are to build up a small community of users, fix things that are broken, and make the code free. I'm not a programmer, so all of this took a lot of yahoo searches. I'd be happy to hear feedback and advice.
Longer term goals would be to have activitypub or some kind of way to have federated interaction between domains. But this needs more thought and probably someone smarter than me to look into it.
Most of the backend is Go/grpc for the db/logic, and rust for the shortlink server. The frontend is a combination of Go templates, vanilla JS, Svelte, and Vue.
There is a ton of other stuff I'm leaving out for brevity. Some of them may come to me in the comments if anybody has a question.
Thanks