deer.social

This is a soft fork of social app.

Get the app itself:

• Web: deer.social
• iOS: App Store WIP
• Android: Play Store WIP

Features Today

• toggle to disable go.bsky.app link proxying for analytics
• toggle to disable default app labeler
• toggle to disable falling back to discover feed in the following feed
• see through quote blocks and detatchments (nuclear block wrt quotes)
  • 
• enable features gates
• configure the location used to determine regional labelers
• entirely ignore !no-unauthenticated labels, even for logged out users

WIP/Planned

• rewrite shared URLs to reference deer.social
• opengraph support for sharing posts and profiles
• selecting custom appviews
• seeing past blocks in post threads (nuclear block for reply chains)

Philosophy

• by default, deer.social should very similar to the official client
  • color and branding are different to distinguish from social-app
  • !no-unauthenticated behavior is different
  • analytics are not present
• opinionated features behind toggles
• focus on high impact, low diff size patches
  • specifically patches that won't require large conflicts to be resolved
• focus on power users (but all users are welome!)
• enable things that are possible but annoying today without egging on antisocial behavior

Development Resources

This is a React Native application, written in the TypeScript programming language. It builds on the atproto TypeScript packages (like @atproto/api), code for which is also open source, but in a different git repository. It is regularly rebased on top of new releases of social-app.

There is vestigial Go language source code (in ./bskyweb/), for a web service that returns the React Native Web application in the social app deployment. However, it is not used in current deer.social deployments. For deer, the intended deployment is with a websever than can serve static files, and reroute to index.html as needed. Today deer.social is hosted on cloudflare pages.

The Build Instructions are a good place to get started with the app itself. If you use nix (and especially direnv) then flake.nix will get you a working environment for the web version of the app.

The Authenticated Transfer Protocol ("AT Protocol" or "atproto") is a decentralized social media protocol. You don't need to understand AT Protocol to work with this application, but it can help. You may wish to reference resources linked in social-app. However, please don't harass the Bluesky team with issues or questions pertaining to deer.social.

Deer is a fork of the official client, social-app. It encompasses a set of schemas and APIs built in the overall AT Protocol framework. The namespace for these "Lexicons" is app.bsky.*.

Contributions

deer.social is a community fork, and we'd love to merge your PR!

As a rule of thumb, the best features for deer.social are ones that have a disproportionately positive impact on the user experience compared to the matinance overhead. Unlike some open source projects, since deer.social is a soft fork, any features (patches) we add on top of upstream social-app need to be maintained. For example, a change to the way posts are composed may be very invasive, touching lots of code across the codebase. If upstream refactors this component, we will need to rewrite this feature to be compatible or drop it from the client.

For this reason, bias towards features that change a relatively small amount of code that is present upstream.

Without an overriding motivation, opinionated features should exist behind a toggle that is not enabled by default. This allows deer.social to cater to as many users as possible.

Guidelines:

• Check for existing issues before filing a new one please.
• Open an issue and give some time for discussion before submitting a PR.
  • This isn't strictly necessary, but I'd love to give my thoughts and scope out your willingness to maintain the feature before you write it.
• Stay away from PRs like...
  • Changing "Post" to "Skeet."
  • Refactoring the codebase, e.g., to replace MobX with Redux or something.
• Include a new toggle and preference for your feature.

If we don't merge your PR for whatever reason, you are welcome to fork and/or self host:

Forking guidelines

Just like social-app, you have our blessing 🪄✨ to fork this application! However, it's very important to be clear to users when you're giving them a fork.

Please be sure to:

• Change all branding in the repository and UI to clearly differentiate from deer.social.
• Change any support links (feedback, email, terms of service, issue tracker, etc) to your own systems.

Self hosting & personal builds

Self hosting is great! It is our intention that deer.social is easy to self host and build on your own. If you host your own instance of deer.social, or make your own builds, please make some level of effort to clarify that it is not an "official" build or instance. This can be in the form of a different domain or branding, but can also be as simple as not advertising your hosted instance or builds as "official" releases.

Security disclosures

If you discover any security issues, please send an email to [email protected]. If the issue pertains to infastructure, code, or systems outside the scope of deer.social, please refer to the disclosure guidelines on social-app if it is hosted by Bluesky PBC. Otherwise, reference the security policy of that system as applicable <3

License (MIT)

See ./LICENSE for the full license.