This organization hosts a project focused on designing and implementing a federated social networking platform that emphasizes decentralization, privacy, interoperability, and instance-level governance.

The system explores how independent servers (instances) can interoperate without relying on a central authority, while still allowing each instance to retain full control over its users, data, moderation rules, and privacy policies.

The project is educational and research-oriented, prioritizing architectural clarity and protocol-level reasoning over feature completeness or large-scale deployment.

The primary goals of this project are to:

• Demonstrate federation through communication between independent social network instances
• Enforce decentralized identity, where users belong to specific instances
• Enable instance-level autonomy for moderation, trust, and privacy decisions
• Implement policy-driven visibility and federation controls
• Study failure handling and resilience in decentralized systems

The project intentionally avoids building a full-scale social media platform and instead focuses on core distributed systems concepts.

• Creation and deletion of posts on individual instances
• Instance-level privacy and visibility controls (e.g., public vs restricted content)
• Cross-instance post propagation using a partial ActivityPub-inspired model
• Instance trust management and blocking of malicious or untrusted instances

• Each instance runs the same backend codebase with different configurations
• Instances communicate using HTTP-based inbox endpoints
• Only a minimal subset of federation activities (Create, Delete) is implemented
• No global user database or centralized moderation authority exists

• Multiple instances run locally with independent configurations
• Each instance uses its own database to preserve decentralization
• Containerization and local orchestration are used for repeatable setup
• Cloud deployment is intentionally out of scope

To maintain focus and clarity, the following are intentionally excluded:

• Full ActivityPub specification compliance
• Blockchain-based identity or storage
• Production-scale infrastructure or cloud-native deployment
• UI polish beyond what is necessary for demonstration

These exclusions are intentional design decisions, not limitations.

This project is intended for:

• Students and educators studying distributed systems and federation
• Developers exploring decentralized social networking architectures
• Researchers interested in moderation, governance, and digital sovereignty

This organization contains multiple repositories, each serving a clear role:

• Backend: Federation logic, APIs, data models, and policy enforcement
• Frontend: Minimal user interfaces for interacting with instances
• Infrastructure / DevOps: Local multi-instance setup and configuration
• Testing: Validation of federation, privacy, and failure scenarios

Each repository is developed independently but follows a shared architectural vision.

• Decentralization over central control
• Configuration-driven behavior over hardcoded rules
• Simplicity and correctness over feature completeness
• Explicit trade-offs and justifications over hidden complexity

This project is deployed and available at www.heliix.live