linkblocks

📚 A federated network to bookmark, share and discuss good web pages with your friends.

It's getting harder and harder to find good web pages. When you do find good ones, it's worth hanging onto them. Linkblocks is your own small corner of the web, where you can keep your favorite pages, and share them with your friends to help them find good web pages too.

🔭 Linkblocks is in an exploratory phase where we're trying out different ways to make it work well. You can try it out, but big and small things might change with every update.

Vision

• On linkblocks, you can organize, connect, browse and search your favorite web pages.
• Share carefully curated or wildly chaotic collections of the stuff you really really like with other linkblocks users and the whole world wide web.
• Follow users with a similar taste and get a feed of fresh good web pages every day. Browse others' collections to discover new web pages from topics you like.
• Annotate, highlight and discuss web pages together with your friends.
• Mark users as trusted whose standards for web pages match yours - and then search through all trusted bookmarks to find good pages on a specific topic. Add trusted users of your trusted users to your search range to cast a wider net.

See this blog post for more on the vision behind linkblocks.

Related Reading

• Where have all the Websites gone? talks about the importance of website curation. Linkblocks is for publicly curating websites.
• The Small Website Discoverability Crisis similar to the previous link, it encourages everyone to share reading lists. By the author of the amazing marginalia search engine.

Development Setup

Install the dependencies:

• Latest stable version of Rust (An older version might work as well, but is not tested)
• podman (Optional, for conveniently running postgres for development and tests)
• mkcert
  • Don't forget to run mkcert -install

Install dependencies available via cargo:

cargo install cargo-run-bin

Copy .env.example to .env and edit it to your liking.

In the root of the repository, launch the server:

cargo bin just watch

Then, open [http://localhost:4040] in your browser.

Hosting Your Own Instance

🏗️ coming soon!

Technical Details

This web app is implemented using technologies hand-picked for a smooth development and deployment workflow. Here are some of the features of the stack:

• Type-safe and fast, implemented in Rust using the axum framework
• Snappy interactivity using htmx with almost zero client-side code
• Tailwind styles without NodeJS, integrated into the cargo build process using build scripts
• Compile-time verified HTML templates using Askama
• Compile-time verified database queries using SQLx
• Concurrent, isolated integration tests with per-test in-memory postgres databases
• Single-binary deployment; all assets baked in
• Integrated TLS; can run without a reverse proxy
• PostgreSQL as the only service dependency
• Built-in CLI for production maintenance
• Auto-reload in development without dropped connections