I had a bunch of ideas for what I’d want in a social media platform (full feature wishlist here: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/8ullyMaguire/975cdc8e4db82a31a8ba671821a1da1b/raw/bcab6d07cfec6dbc8accb2d17faac77e6489fdc1/gistfile1.txt), so I vibecoded a proof-of-concept in Rust. Took a few hours with an AI agent doing most of the heavy lifting. I honestly haven’t checked if it all works — the AI kept telling me it compiled and the endpoints returned 200, so I’m gonna take its word for it.

Stack: Rust, Axum 0.8, SQLite (rusqlite), server-side rendered HTML (no JS framework — just embedded templates), Argon2 password hashing

What it claims to do (~6000 lines of Rust):

Content & Discovery

• Tag system (booru-style) — users can tag posts for categorization, search by tag, filter by tag, combine tags with boolean operators
• Custom feeds — Reddit multireddit meets Firefish antennas. Weighted sources (users, tags, keywords), include/exclude mode, shareable with other users
• Collections — Four visibility levels (private, public-read, public-edit, anybody-edit), posts in sortable order (e.g. chapters), searchable, followable
• Advanced search — Boolean operators, field search, date ranges, tag include/exclude, fuzzy/stemming/synonym support

Moderation (the part I actually care about)

• Slashdot-style voting — +1 Insightful, +1 Funny, +1 Informative, -1 Troll, -1 Misleading, etc. You’re not just upvoting/downvoting; you’re categorizing why
• Limited moderation points — each user has a finite pool of mod points to spend, encouraging thoughtful voting
• Meta-moderation — users are periodically asked to review whether a vote was appropriate. Consistent mis-moderation leads to losing voting privileges
• Score capping — comment scores cap at +5/-1 so no single post dominates
• Obfuscated karma — user karma shows as “Good”, “Excellent”, “Poor” instead of exact numbers to discourage karma-farming

Social Features

• Communities — self-governing groups with public/closed/invite-only visibility, join/leave, member listings
• Private messaging — full conversation view with sent/received styling, reply forms, read/unread tracking
• Notifications — in-app notification center with mark-read and mark-all-read
• Reactions — Facebook-style (Like, Love, Haha, Sad, Angry) on posts and comments
• User trust levels — Discourse-inspired system where privileges unlock as reputation grows. Admins can configure levels, thresholds, and per-level privileges
• Achievements — gamified system (First Post, Rising Star, etc.) with categories and lock/unlock states
• Polls and surveys — create polls, vote, view results

Infrastructure

• Post bumping — users can bump evergreen content back to the top
• Related posts — manual or tag-based related post connections
• User/tag/keyword blocking — block users, tags, keywords, or entire instances
• Ephemeral content schema — ready for auto-pruning old posts
• Anonymous/pseudonymous posting schema — granular per-post identity control

Why Rust?

I originally looked at forking Lemmy (Rust backend, ~80K lines) but wanted something that:
1) Could serve as a testbed for these moderation ideas without fighting upstream
2) Was small enough to understand completely (~6K lines versus 80K+)
3) Could compile to a single binary with no runtime dependencies

What’s Missing / Not Done

• No ActivityPub federation yet (the schema has placeholders but it’s not wired up)
• No file upload endpoint (schema exists for media metadata but the actual upload handler isn’t written)
• No WebSocket for real-time — it’s all pull-based HTTP
• No WASM frontend — it’s server-side rendered HTML with inline CSS
• I didn’t actually test any of this. The AI said it works and I’m choosing to believe it.

Repository

Code: git clone https://git.disroot.org/hirrolot19/social-platform.git

Quick start (allegedly):

cd social-platform-poc  
cargo run --release  
# Server starts at http://0.0.0.0:3000  
# Login: admin / admin123  

The Cargo.toml has all the deps pinned. SQLite database is created fresh on first run with demo users (admin, alice, bob, charlie, diana) and seed data.

I’d love feedback on the moderation system design in particular — I think the Slashdot + limited mod points + meta-moderation combo could solve a lot of the quality problems we see on Reddit and Lemmy, but I’m curious what other people think. Or if someone actually tries to compile it and it explodes, let me know that too.

#programming