How Kronk works

Kronk is a Mastodon fork, but it is organised differently. Where a stock instance is one monolithic timeline app, Kronk is a small framework with feature spaces plugged into it. This page explains the shape so the rest of the platform is legible.

Korners

A korner is a feature space — Kommons for governance, Kalendar for events, Booth for music, Kuestions for Q&A. Each korner is declared by a manifest (a YAML file under config/korners/) that states its identity, the resources it owns, how it stores data, how it projects into the feed, and what settings it exposes. Shipping something new means writing a manifest and its code — not lobbying for a redesign.

Every korner mounts under /hub/<slug> and shares one visual identity (the Kronk-purple palette); differentiation comes from icon, name, and content, not colour.

Pillars

Alongside the korners sit a handful of core pillars — the spaces that are part of Kronk itself rather than a feature plugged into it:

• Home — your timeline.
• Profile — you, and how you present.
• Hub — the grid of korners.
• Nudges — activity and notifications.
• Settings — your preferences.
• Kronk — this space: who we are, what we value, how we work.

Kommons — building Kronk in the open

Kommons is where the community builds Kronk together. Anyone can plant a proposal — a suggested change to a specific part of the platform. A proposal is not a place; it is a piece of feedback that sits within the surface it concerns. The Skeleton and Lattice are two views of the same map: every real page in Kronk is a node, and the proposals about that page gather on it.

The 2.0.0 rebuild is itself tracked this way — the work still to do lives as proposals on this page and across the korners they touch. So the platform is, increasingly, built by using the platform.

Federation & privacy

Kronk speaks ActivityPub: you can follow Kronk accounts from any Mastodon instance, and we federate with the peers we choose to. There is no tracking and no analytics — not as a promise, but because the data isn't structured for it. See Privacy and Values for the principles behind that.

For contributors, docs/kronk_korner_spec.md in the repo is the technical specification this page paraphrases.