New blog post

.github/workflows/publish.yml

@@ -26,7 +26,7 @@ jobs:
         name: Install Grass and Vox
         run: |
             time cargo install grass
-            time cargo install --git https://github.com/emmyoh/vox --features="cli"
+            time cargo install --git global.ssg_repository --features="cli"
       - if: ${{ steps.cache-cargo-restore.outputs.cache-hit != 'true' }}
         name: Save Cargo cache
         uses: actions/cache/save@v4

blog/next-generation-internet.vox

@@ -25,7 +25,7 @@ You can find other people's replicas over the *OkuNet* when they leave notes on
 
 ### The Future
 
-Oku is not a finished product. It's missing features most would expect a browser to have, and features that would complement its unique capabiltiies as well. It needs polish, maintenance, and governance going forward. Most importantly, it needs to overcome big obstacles for adoption:
+Oku is not a finished product. It's missing features most would expect a browser to have, and features that would complement its unique capabilities as well. It needs polish, maintenance, and governance going forward. Most importantly, it needs to overcome big obstacles for adoption:
 
 1. **Safety**, both with regards to safeguarding user privacy and promoting ethical usage of the technology. Users should have peace of mind that they will not have their personal information visible without their knowledge, potentially compromising their physical safety, and users should also be safe from unintentionally encountering objectionable material, including abuse material. Empowering users in this domain requires a long-term interdisciplinary effort involving software developers, ethicists, policymakers, and more.
 2. **Greater platform support**, as most individuals who would benefit from Oku are not using Linux systems. While significant consideration has been paid to this as I've developed Oku, the time and effort necessary to overcome the technical obstacles here are beyond that of a single individual.
@@ -34,8 +34,8 @@ These are challenges that can be overcome with access to greater resources than
 
 Oku is seeking contributions from:
 * **Users** - Your feedback and support is invaluable to open-source projects like Oku. If you consider Oku to be quality software, please help sustain its development [by donating]({{ global.sponsor_link }}).
-* **Mentors** – Mentorship & guidance from anyone–including open-source maintainers, non-profit administrators, founders, or engineers–is much desired. Please [get in touch](mailto:[email protected]) to set up a chat.
-* **Developers** – Your expertise is needed in porting Oku to more platforms. If you're able to assist with getting WebKitGTK compiling on macOS or Windows, or if you're able to assist with embedding Servo as a GTK component, please [reach out](mailto:[email protected]).
+* **Mentors** --- Mentorship & guidance from anyone---including open-source maintainers, non-profit administrators, founders, or engineers---is much desired. Please [get in touch](mailto:[email protected]) to set up a chat.
+* **Developers** --- Your expertise is needed in porting Oku to more platforms. If you're able to assist with getting WebKitGTK compiling on macOS or Windows, or if you're able to assist with embedding Servo as a GTK component, please [reach out](mailto:[email protected]).
 * **Artists** - Branding for Oku, including a logo, would be highly appreciated. I'm a lot better at writing code than I am attempting to draw. Additionally, design concepts for virtual avatars that could be integrated into OkuNet would be amazing. Please [post any art to GitHub Discussions](https://github.com/OkuBrowser/oku/discussions/new?category=show-and-tell).
 * **Investors** - Please [get in touch](mailto:[email protected]) to set up a chat.
 

blog/year_of_oku.vox

@@ -0,0 +1,61 @@
+---
+title = "A Year of Oku"
+date = 2025-01-05T00:00:00+00:00
+layout = "post"
+permalink = "date"
+---
+
+{% markdown %}
+
+---
+
+*Oku is a distributed knowledge management system for collaborative teams. The Oku browser is a rich client for the Oku network.
+For more details, [read the mission statement]({{ global.url }}/about).*
+
+---
+
+2024 was a significant year for Oku. Solid technical foundations have been laid, preparing the project for open-source contributions and increasing adoption in the year ahead.
+
+### In numbers
+#### [Browser]({{ global.browser_repository }})
+* 88 commits, 53,071 LOC added, 1,703 LOC removed
+#### [Node]({{ global.protocol_repository }})
+* 85 commits, 29,087 LOC added, 13,812 LOC removed
+#### [Vector database]({{ global.vector_db_repository }})
+* 50 commits, 6,035 LOC added, 3,254 LOC removed
+#### [Static site generator]({{ global.ssg_repository }})
+* 37 commits, 291,460 LOC added, 2,605 LOC removed
+
+Overall, that's 260 commits across four repositories, with 379,653 LOC added and 21,374 LOC removed.
+While that may not sound like a lot, it was the result of solo development over a year where I was either studying or working full-time for much of it. I'm additionally happy to report that, this year, (a) Oku received €5,000 through an NLnet NGI0 Entrust grant as part of the European Commission's Next Generation Internet Initiative, (b) the Oku browser has at least 880 installs on Linux, and (c) Oku has received 183 GitHub stars across its repositories.
+
+## Where has Oku been this past year?
+##### Oku started off 2024 as an endeavour to experiment with local-first media publishing, and in that time I've learned a lot. Here are some of the lessons I've learned.
+#### The beginning
+Initially, Oku was a browser with [IPFS](https://ipfs.tech/) support, allowing users to access [content-addressed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_storage) media from existing IPFS nodes. This solved a specific use case, accessing information after its source has become inaccessible, but it ultimately wasn't a valuable solution, as:
+- The information wasn't 'living'; Web pages accessed through IPFS are inherently static because they're addressed by the content itself.
+    - Content could be censored relatively easily by external authorities as a consequence.
+- **The issue with 'content discovery' isn't actually there---it's a supply problem! Finding archived Web content is a relatively niche and [sufficiently solved](https://web.archive.org/) use case which didn't need 'peer-to-peer' technologies.**
+
+So, I dropped IPFS and began experimenting with [Iroh](https://www.iroh.computer/), looking to make a browser that valued publishing media just as much as it valued browsing it, a [goal of the first Web browser](https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/worldwideweb/). My initial aim was to create a peer-to-peer file system that enabled mutable, distributed sites. To that end, I've been largely successful in my efforts, with [replicas]({{ global.url }}/guide/Replicas.html) having become a significant feature in Oku. I quickly realised, however, that from the replica many other capabilities emerge that fix the indirections that affect much of what we do online. Oku replicas not only facilitate file sharing, as many peer-to-peer technologies historically have, but they enable distributed knowledge management, effectively doing what Notion and Google Drive do but simultaneously and without the cost of using a centralised service.
+
+#### Getting experimental
+A lot of the lessons I learned at this point were technical. Oku is written in Rust, which shines at providing great abstractions to make relatively low-level work 'feel' high-level. I could write about what I learned with regards to peer-to-peer networking technology, but I frankly haven't had to learn much about how [distributed hash tables (DHTs)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table) or [NAT holepunching](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hole_punching_(networking)) is implemented. Instead, I learned a lot about memory safety and concurrency.
+
+The UI toolkit used by the Oku browser is [GTK](https://www.gtk.org/), which is single-threaded; it is consequently a frustratingly bad choice for a Web browser if you want it to perform well, but surprisingly the best option short of either writing separate UIs per platform or building an [Electron](https://www.electronjs.org/) application. Many times, I felt as if I had to compromise a lot on performance to safely mutate the state of the UI, but I've since learned the following:
+- Take advantage of [`LazyLock`](https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/sync/struct.LazyLock.html) to globally access structures across your UI, and give them [interior mutability](https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/interior-mutability.html) to avoid needing to make exclusive borrows.
+- Encapsulate much of your computationally-expensive functionality in structures that perform operations in parallel and send the results to the calling thread. This makes accessing the UI from its only thread more ergonomic; the computation is still multithreaded, but the UI thread will only block to update its own state.
+    - Parallelising with iterators is a common pattern; data structures with interior mutability make this possible as they can be safely mutated across threads if their members can.
+
+Returning to features that emerge from replicas, I created [the OkuNet]({{ global.url }}/guide/OkuNet.html) as a way for users to build up local indexes of content in an intuitive way. This [social bookmarking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking) feature backs Oku's searching capabilities. To provide multimodal semantic searching in addition to text search, I needed an embedded vector database; I ended up building my own, as, rather surprisingly, the existing technology is not thoroughly developed. I've written [a detailed description of my motivations and implementation]({{ global.vector_db_repository}}/blob/543ed8bd4f88f4b5d7819ce7f4cdff18e5f8ec74/README.md), but suffice it to say, implementing semantic search & content recommendation with scale in mind is shockingly difficult despite its popularity and I hope my approach will be validated in the future.
+
+## Where is Oku going in the next year?
+
+Well, *I'm* heading off to London for my honeymoon until 20 January, but after I return home to the US I plan on tackling [the many items on the project roadmap]({{ global.browser_repository }}/discussions/330) throughout the next year. I hope to get a more stabilised version of Oku with its current feature-set into users' hands as soon as possible so that I can gather valuable user feedback on what works, what could be improved, and what isn't useful in practice---the distributed computing space has had a tragic history of building things that nobody wants (yet) and I'd rather Oku not be another such project. In addition, I hope to develop a closer relationship with those in the same ecosystems, such as [Igalia](https://www.igalia.com/), [the GNOME Project](https://www.gnome.org/) and [Number Zero](https://n0.computer/) to help each other advance aspects of our projects' missions.
+
+With regards to what will be *built* next, I want to prioritise getting as much of Oku's capabilities into as many hands as possible. To that end, the cross-platform command-line interface should continue to receive as much attention and support as the browser, so long as the browser remains confined to Linux. It is, of course, a very interesting time for browsers as well, with machine learning advancements and potential funding issues for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox making the browser itself ripe grounds for disruption.
+
+*If you find potential in Oku and want its development to continue, please [consider supporting it]({{ global.url }}/contribute) as it would not be possible otherwise.\
+I can be reached via [email](mailto:[email protected]) or [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/sayahi.bsky.social).*
+
+{% endmarkdown %}

global.toml

@@ -6,4 +6,6 @@ description = "Your home on the Internet"
 author = "Emil Sayahi"
 browser_repository = "https://github.com/OkuBrowser/oku"
 protocol_repository = "https://github.com/OkuBrowser/oku-fs"
+vector_db_repository = "https://github.com/emmyoh/zebra"
+ssg_repository = "https://github.com/emmyoh/vox"
 sponsor_link = "https://github.com/sponsors/emmyoh"

layouts/default.vox

@@ -6,6 +6,7 @@
         {% include head.html %}
     </head>
     <body>
+        {% include notice.html %}
         <a id="skip" href="#skip-target">Skip to main content</a>
         {% include header.html %}
         <div class="container content" id="skip-target">

layouts/index.vox

@@ -6,6 +6,7 @@
         {% include head.html %}
     </head>
     <body>
+        {% include notice.html %}
         <a id="skip" href="#skip-target">Skip to main content</a>
         {% include header.html %}
         <div id="skip-target">

pages/about.vox

@@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
+---
+layout = "default"
+permalink = "about/index.html"
+---
+
+{% markdown %}
+
+[← Back to home page]({{ global.url }})
+
+The Internet as it exists today is filled with [leaky abstractions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_abstraction) that make our lives harder. Hosting files, sharing them, and collaboratively editing them are burdensome endeavours that cost time & money due to [the reliance on central authorities: servers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client%E2%80%93server_model). Dedicated servers experience downtime and security breaches, while cloud providers introduce hidden costs, configuration challenges, and a lack of oversight & governance.
+
+Oku aims to address the failings of the client-server paradigm, offering:
+* Authority over your own data without the need to trust a third-party
+* Painless migration; no vendor lock-in, as your files are yours
+* Fault-tolerance in the network when nodes go offline
+* Simplified identity & access management
+* Painless communication across NAT
+
+**Oku is a distributed knowledge management system for collaborative teams**, enabling:
+* Collaborative file editing
+* Fault-tolerant file hosting that scales
+* Social bookmarking
+* Document search & discovery
+
+[Source Code →]({{ global.protocol_repository }})
+
+The Web has evolved with the client-server paradigm, having become increasingly reliant on advertising revenue to fund the infrastructure costs associated with hosting. The ad-supported model of Web hosting has introduced incentives for service providers to degrade the user experience, manifesting in search engines that provide [clickbait](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickbait) results, and social media platforms that [penalise content discovery to keep users on their platforms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy).
+
+**The Oku browser is a [rich client](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_client) for the Oku network**; it repurposes Web technology to promote human agency by:
+* Making content creation & distribution accessible to all
+* Extending the lifespan of information, keeping media accessible until the last copy is lost
+* Allowing individual users to control what information they wish to discover
+
+The Oku browser provides a parallel space to the Web where information is served by its authors. This allows for:
+* [Collaboratively building & publishing sites in real time without hosting fees]({{ global.url }}/guide/Replicas.html)
+* Distributed search & social media without ads
+* Private, on-device browsing recommendations tailored to your interests
+
+[Source Code →]({{ global.browser_repository }})
+
+[Frequently Asked Questions →]({{ global.url }}/faq)
+
+{% endmarkdown %}

pages/contribute.vox

@@ -7,10 +7,12 @@ permalink = "contribute/index.html"
 
 [← Back to home page]({{ global.url }})
 
+**To continue development to 2026, Oku is seeking to raise $75,000 through grants, user donations, and investment**.
+
 Oku is seeking contributions from:
 * **Users** - Your feedback and support is invaluable to open-source projects like Oku. If you consider Oku to be quality software, please help sustain its development [by donating]({{ global.sponsor_link }}).
-* **Mentors** – Mentorship & guidance from anyone—including open-source maintainers, non-profit administrators, founders, or engineers—is much desired. Please [get in touch](mailto:[email protected]) to set up a chat.
-* **Developers** – Your expertise is needed! If you're able to assist with any of [the items on the project roadmap]({{ global.browser_repository }}/discussions/330), please [create a pull request]({{ global.browser_repository }}/compare).
+* **Mentors** --- Mentorship & guidance from anyone—including open-source maintainers, non-profit administrators, founders, or engineers—is much desired. Please [get in touch](mailto:[email protected]) to set up a chat.
+* **Developers** --- Your expertise is needed! If you're able to assist with any of [the items on the project roadmap]({{ global.browser_repository }}/discussions/330), please [create a pull request]({{ global.browser_repository }}/compare).
 * **Artists** - Branding for Oku, including a logo, would be highly appreciated. I'm a lot better at writing code than I am attempting to draw. Additionally, design concepts for virtual avatars that could be integrated into OkuNet would be amazing. Please [post any art to GitHub Discussions](https://github.com/OkuBrowser/oku/discussions/new?category=show-and-tell).
 * **Investors** - Please [get in touch](mailto:[email protected]) to set up a chat.