Synthetic Pop

Synthetic Pop is an offline, deterministic synthetic community generator for demos, staging data, simulations, and repeatable test fixtures. The first implemented product wedge is a forum community generator that produces synthetic users, deterministic personas, interests, communities, posts, comments, membership relationships, and activity events from explicit inputs.

Current status: Milestone 5 scenario generation and export. The Rust workspace contains a core engine API, request validation primitives, deterministic field-level RNG primitives, reproducibility metadata, a serde-ready canonical model, forum scenario generation, persona-aware bios, CLI generation, and forum dataset exports. Policy filtering, language bindings, desktop, and WASM surfaces are still unavailable.

Forum Scenario Config

The forum scenario accepts YAML with this shape:

scenario: forum
seed: demo
population:
  users: 100
communities:
  - general
  - support
content:
  posts: 500
  comments: 1000
output_format: jsonl

output_format is optional and defaults to jsonl. Supported values are json, jsonl, csv, sqlite-sql, postgres-sql, and prisma-seed. population.user_count, content.post_count, and content.comment_count are accepted as aliases for users, posts, and comments.

CLI

Generate from direct flags:

synthetic-pop generate forum \
  --seed demo \
  --users 100 \
  --communities general,support \
  --posts 500 \
  --comments 1000 \
  --format jsonl

Generate from a config file and write an export:

synthetic-pop generate forum \
  --config scenario.yml \
  --format postgres-sql \
  --output forum.sql

The CLI supports json, jsonl, csv, sqlite-sql, postgres-sql, and prisma-seed exports. When --output is omitted, output is written to stdout.

Determinism

For the same supported inputs, the forum generator and exporters produce the same dataset and export text. Deterministic derivation is based on the explicit seed, scenario config, deterministic RNG algorithm, and selected export format. Changing the seed, counts, community list, or format can change the output.

Each generated user has exactly one persona record. Persona numeric scores are bounded 0.0..=1.0 values for Big Five traits plus posting frequency, controversy affinity, humor affinity, technical depth, and meme affinity. Categorical persona fields are verbosity, sleep_phase, and activity_pattern, serialized as snake_case.

The forum generator includes a static in-code interest catalog. Each user gets 2-5 deterministic interest IDs scored from persona traits: technical depth boosts programming/Linux/systems/tooling interests, extroversion plus posting frequency boosts community/events/collaboration interests, and humor plus meme affinity boosts gaming/memes/culture interests. Community membership and post/comment author selection use those persona signals where matching records exist while preserving requested counts and referential consistency.

User bios are generated after personas and interests exist. They are offline template output based on role phrases, assigned interests, verbosity, technical/humor/meme affinities, and agreeableness or controversy affinity. They do not use LLM-backed generation or runtime learning.

Synthetic Pop does not currently apply policy filtering or external data-pack loading to generated records. Do not treat generated output as policy-screened content.

Local Validation

Run the Rust workspace checks from the repository root:

cargo build
cargo test
cargo clippy --all-targets --all-features -- -D warnings

See docs/QUALITY.md for the expected outcome and current test scope.

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE.