bliish.space

a space for anyone

Bliish.space is an ultra-fast, lightweight, open-source social platform with customizable profiles, no ads, no tracking, and simple, affordable self-hosting. It includes profiles, wall posts, friends, favorites, props, blogs, comments, groups, notifications, private messages, automoderation, and user-friendly admin tools.

Early release: This project is under active development. Expect changes to setup, deployment, and documentation.

Highlights

🔓 Open source: GPL-3.0-only code that people can inspect, change, run, and share.

🚫 No tracking or ads: No built-in analytics pixels, ad networks, or personalized feed algorithm.

🎨 Custom profiles: Profiles can include a wall, friends, groups, blogs, messages, theme songs, and playful skins.

⚡ Small and lightning fast: One Node process, SQLite, local uploads, server-rendered pages, and no required third-party runtime services.

🛠️ Easy to manage: Admins can change branding, home copy, moderation, automod, rate limits, users, and email without touching code.

💸 Tiny hosting bill: A Hetzner CX23 VPS costs about $4.99/month for a 50k-member community, or run it on a server you already own with no new hosting bill.

🌐 Light by default: Server-rendered pages stay quick on low-powered devices and low-data connections, with no required client-side JavaScript.

🛡️ Safer communities: Automod, reports, user blocks, bans, rate limits, and moderator accounts give communities practical moderation tools.

Quick Start

corepack enable
pnpm install
pnpm db:init
pnpm dev

Open http://localhost:3000.

With the default environment, the first signed-up account becomes the admin. Sign in with that account and open /admin to configure the instance.

pnpm db:init initializes a fresh empty database. The app also initializes the schema on startup.

Checks

pnpm typecheck
pnpm test
pnpm build

Default Brand Assets

Default Bliish.space favicon, social preview, app icon, and manifest files are generated from the same settings-derived asset helpers used by the runtime branding routes.

pnpm assets:brand
pnpm assets:brand:clean

Self-Hosting

The recommended production path is one small Hetzner Cloud VPS in Europe, managed with the CLI deployment guide. The default cx23 target is intentionally modest: with controlled uploads and normal social activity, it is a practical starting point for roughly 10k-50k registered accounts and 1k-5k daily active users before operators should profile, tune, or resize. Official maintainers deploy bliish.space from this repository. Independent operators should use a public fork or copy if they want GitHub auto-deploys for their own instance; manual VPS updates can also pull directly from upstream.

Project Layout

src/
  routes/        HTTP routes and form handlers; nested helpers live beside their feature
  views/         server-rendered page markup grouped by product area
  shell/         app chrome: default layout, navigation, footer, global banners, and page layout primitives
  ui/            shared forms, icons, panels, avatars, actor summaries, links, people, comments, discussion, and engagement components
  server/        auth, database, relationship data, indexing, uploads, rendering, moderation, and security
  scripts/       asset-generation scripts
  automodPolicy.ts shared automod scope, action, pattern, and limit policy
  brand.ts       shared default brand icon SVG source
  currentUser.ts shared authenticated-user shape
  messages.ts    shared private-message form contracts
  models.ts      shared product read models
  notifications.ts shared notification type and label contracts
  paths.ts       shared app route and media URL builders
  policy.ts      shared limits, defaults, validation, and rate-limit policy
  roles.ts       shared roles and staff permission checks
  socialLinks.ts shared profile social-link validation and platform metadata
  text.ts        shared text formatting helpers
  values.ts      shared unknown-value parsing helpers
  theme/         color palette derivation and generated theme CSS helpers
  skins/        profile skin contracts, color palette helpers, and skin color-palette editor
public/          static CSS, icons, and bundled media assets; CSS is grouped by cascade layer
data/            local SQLite database and uploads, created at runtime and ignored by git
docs/            operator and security notes
deploy/          provider-specific deployment scripts

Contributor Orientation

Routes stay in src/routes; they handle auth, form parsing, validation, and redirects.
Views stay in feature folders under src/views; they render page markup and reuse focused UI modules from src/ui.
SQLite access stays in src/server/db; public feature modules can delegate to nested implementation files.
src/server/db/schema.ts is the schema source of truth. Keep account export, moderation, and automod code in sync with schema changes.
User HTML must be sanitized before storage and rendered through the shared trustedHtml boundary.
Runtime output stays out of source: data, dist, and node_modules are ignored local state.

Runtime Choices

Hono for the HTTP server.
TypeScript with server-rendered JSX.
SQLite through better-sqlite3.
Argon2id password hashing.
Plain CSS.
Local filesystem uploads.
Vitest for server-side tests.

License

Bliish.space is licensed under GPL-3.0-only. Official license text: gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html.

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