Lavender Project

A distributed, federated blogging & social network platform built as a full-stack Django + JavaScript monorepo.
Inspired by Diaspora and simplified for academic purposes, Lavender implements a peer-to-peer social network with federated login, inbox-based distribution, and fine-grained privacy controls.

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📔 Project Description

The web is fundamentally interconnected and peer-to-peer.
There’s no reason we should all rely on a single social network provider like Facebook, Google+, or MySpace.
What if authors on different nodes could seamlessly share posts, likes, and comments across networks without a centralized service?

Lavender is designed in this spirit — simple, federated, decentralized.
It allows:

• Importing other sources of content (e.g., GitHub activity).
• Distributed sharing of posts across nodes using an inbox model similar to ActivityPub.
• Fine-grained privacy: public, unlisted, friends-only posts.
• A full-stack monorepo with Django backend and JavaScript frontend.

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⭐ Core Features

• Distributed Networking: Authors on different nodes interact seamlessly.
• Federated Login: Secure authentication across nodes.
• Inbox-Based Distribution: Push posts, likes, comments to relevant followers.
• Privacy Controls: Public, unlisted, friends-only posts.
• Content Import: Integrate content from external sources like GitHub.
• Monorepo Architecture: Single repo for frontend & backend.

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📖 How It Works

Scenario Example:

1. Author posts a public announcement → sent to all followers’ inboxes.
2. Friends-only posts → sent to friends’ inboxes only.
3. Likes & comments → sent to post author’s inbox.
4. Entries are aggregated into an author’s stream.
5. Authors can manage profiles, posts, and visibility settings.

Main Concepts:

• Node — A web server with its own database, storing all necessary data.
• Author — Creates entries, follows others, likes and comments posts.
• Entry — A post with a unique URL, visibility settings, and metadata.
• Inbox — Message queue for posts, likes, comments between nodes.

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🛠 Local Setup & Test Instructions

Local Setup

# 1. Initialize a virtual environment
python -m venv venv

# 2. Activate the virtual environment
source venv/bin/activate

# 3. Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt

# 4. Create .env file inside source directory
echo 'LOCAL_HOST="http://127.0.0.1:8000/"' > source/.env

# 5. Run migrations and start server
cd source
python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate
python manage.py runserver

Visit the API at: http://127.0.0.1:8000/

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Running Tests

# 1. Follow local setup steps above

# 2. Change .env environment key
echo 'LOCAL_HOST="http://testserver/"' > source/.env

# 3. Run migrations (if needed)
cd source
python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate

# 4. Run tests
python manage.py test

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📚 API Endpoints

Key endpoints include:

• Authors: /api/api/authors/
• Posts: /api/api/authors/{author_pk}/posts/
• Comments: /api/api/authors/{author_pk}/commented
• Likes: /api/api/authors/{author_pk}/liked
• Profile Images: /api/api/profileimage/{img_id}
• Post Images: /api/api/posts/{post_id}/image

(Full API documentation available in project docs — note: Swagger docs deprecated)

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Languages:

• Python: 62.4%
• JavaScript: 23.3%
• CSS: 8.5%
• HTML: 5.7%
• Dockerfile: 0.1%

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📜 License

Licensed under the MIT License.

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