Finished the fuzz circuit tonight — first pedal that didn't hum. Posting the board photos now.
Kopling is a new platform for communities that want to be involved now — sharing moments the second they happen, building a following from the first post, and keeping every conversation structured instead of scattered.
In development · by whom?
Finished the fuzz circuit tonight — first pedal that didn't hum. Posting the board photos now.
That was fast. Which transistors did you end up using?
These aren't features on a roadmap. They're constraints every technical decision below was tested against.
Free license, public development, and a governance model designed before the community arrives — not after.
Discussions federate as discussions — threaded, forum-shaped — over ActivityPub, following the trail Discourse and NodeBB blazed.
Server-rendered pages that are fast on weak connections, installable as an app, with push notifications from day one.
Replies stream in as they're posted. Share the moment while it's still a moment — no refresh button required.
Extensions are PHP and templates — no build step, no frontend framework to learn, no upgrade roulette.
Runs modestly on modest hosting, shines on real infrastructure — and tells you plainly which mode you're in.
Most projects announce a vision. We're publishing the engineering decisions — and the reasoning — so you know exactly what you'd be building on, contributing to, or sponsoring.
rev. 2026-07 — decisions are published before code so they can be challenged early. Disagree? That's what the discussion is for.
If you've ever built for a forum platform, you know the pain: a bespoke frontend framework, a mandatory build pipeline, and monkey-patching that shatters on every core update. Kopling's extension surface is designed so that none of that exists.
// A complete "reactions" feature: one hook, one template. Outlet::add('post.actions', 'reactions::button'); <!-- reactions/button.blade.php --> <x-k::action :post="route('reactions.toggle', $ctx)" swap="outer"> 👍 {{ $ctx->reactions_count }} </x-k::action>
Most open source projects improvise their governance after the community shows up — and pay for it later. Kopling states its model up front, before anyone contributes a line: founder-led, with published guarantees that hold no matter who leads. Six commitments are already settled:
One person holds final say and is named. No pretend democracy, no diffuse ownership where accountability goes to die. Decisions follow a decide-by-default process: proposed in public, an objection window stated, the outcome and reasoning recorded in writing.
The code is free software and stays that way. The right to fork is the community's ultimate constitutional guarantee — it keeps any leadership honest, this one included. No source-available bait, no relicensing rug-pull.
Sponsors and donors receive recognition, visibility, and a consulted voice — never authority over technical decisions, moderation, or the roadmap. Funding and governance are deliberately decoupled, and finances are published.
Decisions, their reasoning, and the project's money live in the open. Private handling is a narrow, named, time-bounded exception — for people's privacy, legal matters, and unreleased security fixes — never a habit.
A technical steering committee, chartered with responsibilities of its own — binding say over the extension API contract, breaking-change policy, and deprecation windows. It starts small, earns scope as the contributor pool grows, and its remit is written down, not implied.
Founder-led must never mean founder-dependent. A written succession plan — what happens to the code, the trademark, the registry, and the infrastructure — is published before 1.0, so the project's future never rests on one person's availability.
The full governance charter — the steering committee's chartered responsibilities included — is being drafted in the open, in plain language, and will be adopted before the 1.0 release. Kopling will govern itself on its own software: every decision, discussed and recorded on a Kopling instance.
Hold us to itAnyone can publish a spec sheet. What can't be copied is the career that produced this one — two decades running on both tracks at once: engineering leadership in enterprise software by day, open source community stewardship the rest of the time. Kopling is where those tracks finally merge.
Every commitment on this page is a lesson paid for in practice: the extension APIs that broke ecosystems, the governance that arrived too late, the hosting realities that make or break adoption, the maintainers who burned out unpaid. Kopling isn't a fresh idea — it's a second attempt, informed by all of it.
“I've watched brilliant community software struggle for every reason except the code. Kopling is what I'd build knowing what I know now — and this time, the hard lessons are decided before the first release, not after.”
A decade leading Flarum — from moderator to core developer to chairman of its foundation. Releases, roadmap, team, and an ecosystem of hundreds of extensions.
Led development teams at one of Europe's largest fashion e-commerce platforms — a unicorn — with engineering-lead roles throughout a twenty-year career.
Authored one of the earliest widely adopted Laravel multi-tenancy packages — ecosystem authorship in the exact framework Kopling builds on.
Years inside a hosting provider, enterprise cloud migrations, auto-scaling realtime systems — the operational reality behind "runs anywhere, shines on real infrastructure".
Guided one of the largest Dutch online communities through a live migration between forum platforms — and has chaired communities since 2008.
Took part in the Discourse × NodeBB conversations on forum-to-forum federation — the work Kopling's approach builds on directly.
Kopling is at the beginning — the decisions are made, the code is starting. Early followers shape the roadmap; early sponsors make full-time development possible.
Sponsorship funds core development, registry infrastructure, and the translation platform. Sponsors are credited on this site and in every release.
Per the governance commitments above: sponsorship buys recognition and gratitude, never authority. Budgets and spending will be published openly, at a regular cadence.