Knot System

Knot System is a small system with a personal website and a feed reader, based on the Micropub, Microsub and IndieAuth protocols, developed and used by Max Häßlein. Created as part of a design research project examening independent social publishing on the internet at Ohm-Hochschule Nuremberg.

Source code available on GitHub, see the blog entry by Max or the beta test page for more info.

Consists of several exchangable modules (Site, Home, Daemon, Auth, Control) and can be installed with a provided Knot Installer. Still in Beta, feedback welcome!

This system provides a private website with a chronological feed, a backend to write new posts and to subscribe to and read feeds of other websites and some modules that handle authentification and background activity. The modules are meant to be used together, but every piece can easily be replaced by another service that uses the microsub, micropub or IndieAuth protocols.

All these prototypes are written in PHP, with human readable text files for data storage in a transparent folder structure, so no dependencies (other than PHP 8 and some additional PHP libraries) are required. They should run on any off-the-mill webhosting account. The folder structure of the content folder is inspired by the Kirby CMS, which is designed to be readable by humans, so it should be very easy to move the data to another system. There is no opaque database or proprietory format, so you can always get to your data, even if this system stops working. Everything aims to be as simple and fast as possible.

The Knot System is a collection of smaller modules that can be used together. Every module can be replaced by an alternative, for example if you don't want to use Knot Site as your website, you could use a WordPress or Kirby install with a micropub-plugin as your website, and still use all the other modules that the Knot System provides.