Quanta
Welcome to the Fediverse!
A new kind of decentralized and federated social-media platform!
Create hierarchically organized content that's always editable, shareable on the Fediverse, and saved on IPFS, plus many powerful features like wikis, blogging, document collaboration, conversation threads, secure messaging, video/audio recording & sharing, file sharing, a podcatcher, and much more.
Social Media
Quanta is a free and open source Social Media platform, with features similar to Twitter, Facebook, and other micro-blogging sites. Your social media feed displays the most recent (i.e. reverse chronological timeline) posts that are made to or about you and lets you reply to other users.
Fediverse
The fediverse (applications like Mastodon) can read and write social media messages to Quanta instances and vice versa. Quanta has a Social Media feed very similar to Mastodon. You can follow other users on the Fediverse, and be followed by them. Send private messages (DMs) or post public messages to any Fediverse user/server.
Wikis
A powerful Wiki editor, where any piece of content can be edited, organized in a hierarchy, and shared with it's own unique URL. It's very easy to create content where everything, all the way down to individual sentences, can be linked to, shared, moved, etc., in a hierarchical model analogous to file system folders.
Blogs
Since content can be edited, formatted with markdown, and include images, videos, links, code blocks, etc, the platform can serve as a feature-rich way to publish blogs. Access Controls (i.e. the Sharing Dialog) allow you to share content with the public at large, or with only specific users of your choice.
Web3/IPFS
Allows file attachments like images, video, audio files, or any other kind of file attached to individual nodes to [optionally] uploaded to IPFS instead of the Quanta database. Checking a checkbox for "IPFS" on the file upload dialog is all that's required to post files to IPFS. Files are automatically "pinned" (and IPFS terminology) when added and unpinned when deleted.
File Sharing
Since any node can have a file attached to it, and then shared with any person, group of people, or made public, the platform functions well as a general-purpose file sharing app.
Secure Messaging
Supports encryption and secure messaging between users, where only the owner of a node (or others they've granted access) can see the decrypted text. Quanta uses the browser's built-in Crypto API and PKE (Public Key Encryption) in a scheme where neither the public key nor the unencrypted text ever leaves the browser. This is commonly called "End to End" (E2E) encryption because only the sender and receiver ever have the encryption keys to the data, and there is no requirement to "trust" the server to have the keys and manage them securely
Access Controls
Sharing nodes to other users is done via the Sharing Dialog available thru the node Editor Dialog. In the Sharing Dialog you simply define what set of users you want to allow to see that node (and all it's descendants, recursively). You can also set any node to "public" which makes it visible to anyone. Whoever creates a node always owns that node, and can control it's sharing, or even delete it and everything underneath it.
Advanced Editing
Powerful and intuitive design of the text editing features make it easy to create, edit, and hierarchically organize content. The Drag-n-Drop feature makes moving and rearranging paragraphs and text a breeze. Most concepts you're familiar with from file systems work the same way in Quanta. You have the familiar Cut, Paste, Create, Edit, Delete, etc., but in a way that's novel and doesn't exist in other platforms. Each node can contain any number of 'child' nodes (aka sub-nodes) making the information always a browse-able 'tree' of content.
PDF Creator
PDF documents can be created by entering text as markdown formatted nodes into a hierarchy, and then exporting to PDF format. The PDF generation uses the markdown headings (hash character, '#') to also automatically include an optional 'Table of Contents' in the PDF document.
Powerful Search
Built on MongoDB, there is a very fast and powerful full-text search capability. Since MongoDB uses Lucene internally, it provides state-of-the-art performance in search, and Quanta leverages all of this. Searching example video: https://quanta.wiki/n/search-example
Timelines
Timelines are a general feature available for any node, to display a reverse-chronological listing view of all subnodes under any given node. This means, for example, if you're doing a team document collaboration, you can view a timeline to see everyone's latest contributions to a document (or sub-section), as a rev-chron listing. It's also a single click to jump from the rev-chron listing (aka. Timeline) to the actual node in the main content tree. Timeline example video: https://quanta.wiki/n/timeline-example
Quantized
The name "quanta" comes from how the platform makes it easy to "Quantize" all content so that it's stored in a fine-grained way, down to the individual sentence level, if desired. This means in collaboration scenarios other users can provide comments (or replies) to individual sentences, rather than having to reply to an entire large post or blog. It also means individual sentences of content have their own URLs. It's still possible to put very long blocks of text content (multiple paragraphs) into single nodes, but the real power of the platform comes from it's ability to separate small chunks of text so they can be commented on by others, linked to, moved around, updated, deleted, etc.
RSS/Podcasts
Consume RSS/Podcast Feeds, by creating a feed-reader node that embeds the feed right onto your content tree. RSS feed nodes automatically provide an audio/video playback interface, for a seamless experience browsing and listening to podcasts. You can also create an aggregate feed of a group of individual RSS feeds, simply by adding multiple feed URLS into an RSS node.
RSS Publishing
All nodes are automatically published as an RSS feed (Public or Private), by having their own unique URL automatically available. Podcatchers/RSS Readers can therefore 'subscribe' to the content under any Quanta node. The node's children become the feed's content items and all audio/video attachments are included as part of the RSS. This means to use Quanta as a podcast publishing platform all that's required is to create the nodes, content, and audio, and the rest is automatic.
Audio/Video Player
Upload an image, audio, or video (or any other kind of file) to a node, and the platform automatically renders a "player" interface for watching the video or playing the audio. This works for any media attached to a node regardless of whether it's stored on Quanta internal database or on IPFS.
Audio/Video Recording
Record Audio or Video directly thru your browser, and save as an attached file to any node. People browsing that node can then click a button to view the recorded media.
Audio/Video Messaging
Asynchronous audio/video chat messaging with your friends by posting audio or video replies in any of the nodes that make up conversion threads or feeds. Each node can have one attachment, and you can record audio/video directly from the app in your browser.
Drag-n-Drop
Files or URLs can be dragged over the app to immediately upload directly into Quanta's DB or onto IPFS. Also, during content editing, nodes can be dragged around inside their parent node to reorder them. For example, if you want one paragraph moved above another you don't need to cut and past; you can just drag and drop.
Custom URLs
Every node automatically has a unique ID which makes them available to be directly accessed by URL. You can also enter a text "name" onto any node (anything unique to your account), and the node will then be available as a URL using that text as the last path part of the URL. Video example here: https://quanta.wiki/n/custom-url
Markdown
Markdown is supported and rendered automatically when the page is viewed, allowing for fonts, links, images, code blocks, and all the things markdown is good for. Every node is automatically assumed to contain markdown text unless you set the node type to a custom type. If you're unfamiliar with what markdown is, that's fine you can just think of it as plain text and it will still work fine.
Math Formulas
Math formulas can be entered using the standard LaTeX, MathML, or AsciiMath notation. LatTeX is a special syntax for text letting you enter math equations, and then when the page is viewed (after editing is done) the math formulas display like what you'd see in a math book, or hand drawn math symbolic formula.
Hierarchical
Unlike most social media, where content exists mainly as a linear chronological feed, Quanta lets you hierarchically organize everything however you want. All content exists as a part of a large tree structure. When you create an account, that is actually creating for you a root node, like in a file system, under which you can create and organize whatever you want however you want, sharing as much of it as you want, with only who you want. You can let a node and all it's subnodes represent a document, represent a photo album, represent a blog, etc. The entire platform is essentially a big tree of content where each user "owns" one root node and whatever tree of content they've created underneath it.
Node Types
Every node has a 'type', which allows the system to customize the editing and rendering of specific nodes. Normally however, users can just ignore node types, because the 'Markdown Type' is used seamlessly by default, without the user even knowing a 'type' was selected. However, at any time, the owner of a node can change the node type. One example of a type is the 'RSS Feed' Type which automatically subscribes to a podcast.
Import/Export
Nodes can be exported to ZIP, TAR, or TAR.GZ, Markdown, PDF, or HTML formats and then downloaded and saved locally. The exported file format is easily browse-able offline, using any web browser, as static HTML files (after extracting into a folder of course), but also contains enough information to be able to import back into a Quanta instance/server later. That is, any exported file can be re-imported later by you or by any other user.
Mobile Support
Quanta is primarily designed for a desktop experience, but mobile devices are supported well also, including the ability to capture video and audio from phones or tablets.
D3 Graphs
Using the powerful D3 Graphics library you can view fully interactive Node Graphs of any branch of a tree, or any custom search query. The Graphs use a physics engine to lay them out visually. You can drag parts of the graph around, pan, zoom, hover the mouse for information on nodes, or click to open any node in a separate browser tab.
Open Source
The entire Quanta platform is open-source and freely available on GitHub, with MIT License, which means you're free to use or modify it in any way for any reason, including to build a commercial product.