The site isn't open source, although I've thought maybe parts of it could be later.
The reason for the blank space is I originally was coming from an angle of news consumption where you could see the meta information of an article, images, summary, etc, alongside a live conversation such as here: https://sqwok.im/p/Q8OggZt9zQX4iA
But when a post is just text it doesn't make as much sense... maybe it could auto calibrate for text only posts? Need to think about it, but thank you for the feedback!