Lorehaven
lorehaven.polarisocial.xyz
Lorehaven — a welcoming home for fanfiction: read, write, import your library, and keep it offline.

I’ve been building Lorehaven, a fanfiction archive and community platform, and I wanted to share what makes it different from the existing options.

The short version

Lorehaven is a self-hosted fanfiction platform designed to make writing for an audience sustainable through a positivity-first feedback culture, community self-governance, and open federation with the rest of the fediverse.

What sets it apart

  • Positivity-first feedback. Reviews and comments pass through a classification pipeline before the author sees them. Destructive or hostile feedback is hidden from the author by default. Authors can opt in to see all feedback. The goal is to make writing for an audience sustainable.

  • Gamification that rewards quality. XP, levels, achievements, badges, and leaderboards — all designed to maximize the quality content shared, not just volume. Trust-weighted aggregation so reputation matters more than raw activity.

  • Self-governance. Trust-level and quorum-based moderation so the admin doesn’t have to police every argument. Significant decisions require multiple reviewers. There’s no path to buying moderation authority or search ranking.

  • Self-hosted and portable. The goal is to make it easy to deploy your own instance. Future objective: help migrate other sites to use this. You own your data, your community, your rules.

  • Federated and connected. Media shared through IPFS (content-addressed, deduplicating). Forum posts federate through ActivityPub, so Lorehaven connects to existing platforms like Mastodon and PieFed. You’re not locked into a silo.

  • Discovery that improves over AO3. Everything tagged, with advanced filtering, tag pages, and recommendation engines. We’re actively trying to address the discoverability shortcomings of existing archives — better search, better tagging, better curation tools.

  • Monetization for early access. A way for readers to support creators and get early access to works, without advertising, trackers, or purchased ranking.

  • Aggressive importing. Built to grow your library by importing from other archives, not by locking you into one ecosystem. The safe fetcher validates every URL and redirect before a byte moves.

  • Customizable. Installable themes, recommendation engines, feed composition, widgets, writing tools, challenge variants — the whole surface is configurable.

What’s actually running

Lorehaven — Current Features

Comprehensive, descriptive list of everything Lorehaven can do right now. Last updated: 2026-09-20

Download & Reading

  • Built-in web reader — Read directly in browser with customizable fonts, themes, and layout. Remembers your place across sessions.
  • Reading progress sync — Server-side tracking of which chapters you’ve read, so your progress follows you across devices.
  • Reading history — Track which works you’ve read and when, with full history management.
  • Reading time estimation — See how long a work will take to read based on word count.
  • Sequential reading mode — Read through series in order, with “next chapter” and “previous chapter” navigation.
  • Multiple export formats — Save works as EPUB, HTML, MOBI, PDF, AZW3, plain text, or Markdown.

Library & Organization

  • Bookmarks — Save works to your library with private notes, tags, and a “recommend” flag.
  • Collections — Curate public or private collections of works around a theme. Others can bookmark your collection to get updates.
  • Series — Organize works into series with proper ordering and navigation.
  • Tags — Tag works with freeform metadata for discoverability and filtering.
  • Work metadata — Rich metadata including rating, warnings, categories, characters, relationships, and fandoms.

Writing & Publishing

  • Drafts — Save works as drafts before publishing. Drafts are private and only visible to the author.
  • Publishing workflow — Publish works with full metadata, chapter structure, and revision tracking.
  • Revisions — Track revisions to works with version history.
  • Chapter management — Add, edit, and reorder chapters within a work.
  • Pseuds — Create multiple pseuds (pen names) for different fandoms or personas. Works are attributed to pseuds, not accounts.

Feedback & Reviews

  • Positivity-first reviews — Reviews pass through a classification pipeline before reaching the author. Destructive feedback is hidden by default.
  • Star ratings — Rate works on a 1-5 star scale with trust-weighted aggregation.
  • Reviews — Write in-depth reviews with ratings. Reviews appear on work page and your profile.
  • Kudos — Give one-click “likes” to works you enjoyed. One kudos per user per work.
  • Threaded comments — Leave comments on works with nested threading.
  • Feedback preferences — Authors can opt in to receive constructive critique; otherwise, only positive feedback is delivered.

Search & Discovery

  • Advanced search filters — Use tag facets, word count ranges, completion status, rating, language, and more.
  • Tag pages — Browse all works tagged with a specific tag, with filtering and sorting.
  • Author pages — View author’s full bibliography and stats.
  • Work pages — Dedicated pages for every work with full metadata, chapters, reviews, and comments.
  • Favorites — Mark authors or works as favorites to get notified of updates.
  • Follow authors — Follow your favorite writers and see their new works in your personal feed.

Community & Social

  • Forum — Full discussion forum with categories, topics, posts, reactions, and polls.
  • Forum groups — Create or join groups for private discussions.
  • Direct messages — Send private messages to other users.
  • Notifications — Get notified about replies, mentions, level-ups, achievements, and more.
  • User profiles — Customizable profiles showing your bio, avatar, and recent activity.
  • Follow users — Follow users and see their updates in your feed.
  • Block users — Block other users to hide their content from your view.

Gamification & Progression

  • XP system — Earn experience points for posting, reacting, voting, moderating, and participating.
  • Levels — Advance through levels, each requiring more XP than the last.
  • Trust levels — Advance from User (TL0) through Curator (TL3), Moderator (TL5), to Admin (TL6) based on participation and reputation.
  • Achievements — Unlock achievements for milestones like “first post,” “100 reactions,” and more.
  • Badges — Earn weekly and monthly badges for top contributors.
  • Leaderboards — Compete on global, weekly, and monthly leaderboards.
  • Reading stats — Track works completed and time spent reading.
  • Progression dashboard — Customize your personal dashboard with widgets showing your stats, quests, and recent activity.

Curation & Moderation

  • Auto-tagging — AI suggests tags for uploaded works based on content. Curators (TL3+) approve or dismiss suggestions.
  • Tag management — Create, edit, and merge tags. Set tag types, categories, and synonyms.
  • Reports — Report posts, comments, or works with a category (spam, harassment, copyright, inappropriate, other) and reason.
  • Report queue — TL5+ can view and resolve all reports.
  • Modlog — Public log of all moderation actions with actor, action, and timestamp.
  • Ban appeals — Banned users can submit an appeal with reason.
  • Trust queue — TL4+ for approving/rejecting posts.
  • Meta-moderation — TL5+ can review moderator decisions and vote on their fairness.

Customization & Themes

  • Design system — “The Reading Room” — warm paper, deep evergreen, muted copper, bookish headings over clean interface text.
  • Theme presets — Three presets ship: Reading Room, After Hours, Clear Day.
  • Reader appearance — Reader appearance is deliberately independent of the site theme.
  • Customizable navigation — Customize your navigation bar with your most-used links.

Infrastructure & Integrations

  • Import framework — Source-adapter import system with safe fetcher that validates every URL and redirect before a byte moves.
  • Multi-site importing — Built to import from other archives (one adapter ported and tested, framework ready for more).
  • Source credentials — Securely store credentials for sources that require authentication.
  • Encrypted secret vault — Encrypted storage for secrets and credentials.
  • Content-addressed blob store — Deduplicating, checksum-verified storage for all artifacts.
  • Job queue — Background job processing with workers, retries, and batch progress.
  • Health checks — Liveness and readiness endpoints for monitoring.
  • ActivityPub — Federate with the Fediverse (partial: outbox delivery implemented).
  • RSS/Atom feeds — Subscribe to new arrivals, followed authors, or specific works.
  • API — REST API with OpenAPI documentation.
  • SQLite or PostgreSQL — Choose your database backend.

This is a proof of concept. I’d love suggestions, feedback, and testers. If any of this resonates — or if you think something’s missing — let me know.