Witchsky Social App 🧙 (alpha)

Hey, witches! This is the codebase for the Witchsky app, based on social.daniela.lol and prior Bluesky forks.

Get the app itself:

• Web: witchsky.app
• iOS: App Store Soon™? (Altstore source in the future?)
• Android: Play Store Soon! (F-Droid repo in the future?)

Improvements on Bluesky

• Cooler name (and kawaii logo)
• Themes, hue slider, and Material You support
• OAuth login option
• Sort/filter accounts in account switchers
• Hold/right click on interaction buttons to use another account
• You can change "post" to any phrase you want in the UI
• Choose between sharing witchsky.app or bsky.app links
• Embed player works with stream.place links!
• Open posts in PDSls and original fedi-bridged pages
• You can delete and redraft (basically edit!) posts
• Better defaults (alt text required 😉 autoplay off 🫨)
• More unique repost icons
• Can download videos
• Stay on a page when switching accounts
• 'Mutuals' in place of 'Following' when relevant
• Pet label (option to toggle, & visibility for everyone else)
• Account AI preferences screen
• No age assurance or blocks based on location
• No push notifications (hopefully will be added later)
• Kept as up-to-date as possible (sporadically unstable as a result)

Runes

These are all available as options in the Runes sub-page of the app's settings.

• Menus
  • Use handles in profile links instead of DIDs
  • Show "Open original post" and "Open post in PDSls" buttons
  • On non-bsky.social handles, show a link to that URL
  • Only show URL on handles with working links
• Badges
  • Trusted verifiers
    • Use own selection of trusted verifiers
    • Trust verifiers from current AppView
  • PDS badges
    • Show a PDS badge next to the display name on profiles
    • Hide PDS badge for Bluesky-hosted accounts
    • Change favicon service
• Impressions
  • Posts
    • Remove likes counts
    • Remove reposts counts
    • Remove quotes counts
    • Remove saves counts
    • Remove reply counts
  • Profiles
    • Remove followers counts
    • Remove following counts
    • Remove post counts
    • Remove "followed by" avatars
    • Show "Follows you" badge
• Usability
  • Feeds
    • Do not fall back to discover feed
    • Hide "Feeds ✨" tab when only one feed is selected
    • Disable composer prompt
    • Disable top-of-feed button
    • Show plus icon on unfollowed feed avatars
    • Hide posts that cannot be replied to from feeds
  • Redirect through go.bsky.app
  • Disable similar accounts recommendations
  • Hide follow button on posts and scrolled profile header
  • Disable verify email reminder
• Display
  • Also liked
    • Show "Also liked" recommendations under post replies
    • Collapse "Also liked" by default
  • Density
    • Account switcher
      • Use compact account switcher
      • Automatically use compact account switcher with more than 6 accounts
  • Combine reposts into a horizontal carousel
  • Display images in higher quality
  • Show client used to post
  • Change custom post phrase
• Infrastructure
  • Post translation provider
    • Google Translate
    • Kagi Translate
    • Naver Papago
    • LibreTranslate
    • Change LibreTranslate instance
  • Change image CDN
  • Change PLC directory
  • Change Constellation instance
  • Set custom AppView DID
  • Do not declare any default app labelers
• Settings sync
  • Sync settings between devices
  • Include OpenRouter API key in synced settings
  • Push settings to cloud
  • Load settings from cloud
• Extra
  • Fetch records directly from PDS to fix broken quotes
  • Auto-like what you repost
  • Disable via repost notifications
  • Show debug context for posts in Discover feed
  • Don't include the 'via' field in own posts
  • Developer mode

TODO: Xan

• Setup App Linking for Android (.well-known w/ app package fingerprint)
• Make fallback email addresses use witchsky.social in Legacy sign-in automatic PDS detection
• Change followed accounts on onboarding
• Visual replies indicator like the Firmament userstyle
• Permit editing Menu options in Runes > Menus (remember Outlinks page?)
  • ShareMenuItems.tsx, ShareMenuItems.web.tsx
• Add Open bridged OG fedi account page option to ProfileMenu.tsx
• Witchsky PDS and .social site (list good songs containing 'bitch' in their titles for related site)

Upcoming or wishful features

• Collapse labels past a customizable number (from the same labeler?) into a labeler clip "(+)"
• Submit releases to the Google Play Store and iOS App Store
• Move from Cloudflare Pages to wisp.place (needs serverless for embeds)
• Move Terms and Privacy policy to Jollywhoppers.com
• Ignore !no-unauthenticated labels
• Better OpenGraph support for sharing profiles & posts (including videos & fixing quotes)
• Seeing past blocks in threads (the nuclear block in reply chains)

Development Resources

This is a React Native application, written in the TypeScript programming language. It builds on the atproto TypeScript packages (like @atproto/api), which are also open source, but in a different git repository.

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 Witchsky deployments. For Witchsky, the intended deployment is with a webserver that can serve static files, and reroute to index.html as needed. Witchsky is currently 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 Witchsky.

Witchsky is a fork of the official Bluesky 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

Witchsky is a community fork, and we'd love to merge your PR!

As a rule of thumb, the best features for Witchsky are those that have a disproportionately positive impact on the user experience compared to the maintenance overhead. Unlike some open source projects, since Witchsky 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, only features that require changing only a small amount of code from upstream should be considered.

Without an overriding motivation, opinionated features should exist behind a toggle that is not enabled by default. This allows Witchsky 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 the lead developers would love to give their thoughts and scope out your willingness to maintain the feature before you write it.
• Stay away from PRs like...
  • Changing "Quote" to "Bitch."
  • Refactoring the codebase, e.g., to replace React Query with Redux Toolkit, etc.
• 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 make it 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 Witchsky.
• 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 Witchsky is easy to self host and build on your own. If you host your own instance of Witchsky, 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 privately disclose them to xan.lol. If the issue pertains to infastructure, code, or systems outside the scope of Witchsky, 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.

Bluesky Social PBC has committed to a software patent non-aggression pledge. For details see the original announcement.

P.S.

We ❤️ you and all of the ways you support us. Thank you for making Witchsky so great! ^.^