Pandacap: Part 1

[isaacschemm]

Pandacap

This has been my hobby project for the better part of the past year, and it's something I've been wanting to make a series of blog posts about for a while. Pandacap is my personal Swiss Army knife web app; it hosts my art gallery and microblog and collects incoming posts and notifications across five different sites and protocols.

The code for Pandacap is open-source (AGPL v3). I don't imagine it will be that useful to many people; trying to ask a non-Microsoft-stack developer to make tweaks to it would be like asking me to contribute to, well, anything in Python. (Plus, the code itself is not very robust, and not at all scalable.) But I've made some very deliberate decisions in the UI of this app, with an eye towards my own psychological well-being. The context collapse of traditional social media kept me away from it for years, and this app (and one of its predecessors, Artwork Inbox) is the reason I can follow artists on Bluesky and Mastodon without giving up in frustration. I'm hoping that someday, these design principles could be useful to other people who find themselves in the same situation.

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