// the find
buckyroberts/Vataxia
Open source social network built with Django and Django REST framework
Vataxia is a Django REST Framework backend for a social network — posts, replies, votes, private messages, a credits/wallet system, and user roles. It was built as a teaching project by the thenewboston YouTube channel, so the primary audience is Django learners, not teams building production social platforms.
The project is well-structured for a learning codebase: apps are split by domain (accounts, posts, votes, credits), each with its own models/serializers/views/urls following DRF conventions consistently. The credits/wallet/invitation system is more interesting than most toy social networks — there's actual transactional logic to study. Fixtures plus a load script mean you can have a running local instance with data in under five minutes. CircleCI config is included, which at least signals someone thought about CI.
No activity since November 2023 and the live API docs URL (vataxia.net) is dead — this is abandoned, not maintained. Token auth is Django REST Framework's built-in DRF token, which is session-like and not suitable for production (no expiry, no refresh). The admin credentials in the README are `pass1234`, which sets the tone for how security is treated here. There are almost no tests — one test file exists under utils, and the rest of the app is untested, so you can't trust a fork without writing the test suite yourself.