Philosophy

The web has lost its way. Content platforms have become surveillance machines, developers have become product managers for walled gardens, and creators have become data points in someone else’s business model.

Laksa exists to offer a different path.

Files First, Always

Your content should be files, not database rows.

Laksa treats content as what it is: text files in a directory structure. Markdown files, assets, templates—they live in a Git repository where you can see them, edit them with your favorite tools, and version control them like any other code.

This isn’t just about developer experience (though that matters). It’s about longevity and portability. When your content is files, you can:

Edit it with any text editor, offline, without our permission
Store it in any Git repository (GitHub, GitLab, your own server)
Back it up using standard tools
Migrate to another platform by copying directories
Keep working even if Laksa.io disappears tomorrow

Database-driven CMSs lock your content behind APIs and export tools. File-first systems give you direct access to your own words.

Developer Experience is User Experience

If it’s hard for developers, it’s wrong for everyone.

We built Laksa with Elixir and Phoenix because these tools respect developers. We use Liquid templates because designers and developers both understand them. We expose Git repositories because developers know how to work with them.

But this isn’t just for developers. When the foundation is solid and the abstractions are clean, everyone benefits:

Performance: Elixir’s concurrency means your site stays fast under load
Real-time updates: LiveView means changes appear instantly without page refreshes
Reliability: The BEAM VM means your site stays up
Extensibility: When you need custom functionality, the platform doesn’t fight you

Developer experience isn’t a luxury feature. It’s the foundation of a platform that will still work in five years.

You Own Your Content, Period

Ownership means you can leave.

Most platforms talk about ownership while making it practically impossible to migrate your content elsewhere. They’ll give you an export button that produces some proprietary JSON format nobody else can read.

With Laksa:

Your content is in standard Markdown with YAML frontmatter
Your templates use Liquid, a well-documented open standard
Your repository is Git, the universal version control system
Your data export is PostgreSQL dumps or API access, your choice

Want to move to another platform? Clone your repo, point it elsewhere, done. No export process, no data munging, no vendor lock-in.

True ownership means you can walk away whenever you want. If Laksa isn’t serving you, we want your exit to be trivial.

Track Content, Not Behavior

We believe in analytics without surveillance.

The web runs on behavioral tracking. Platforms monitor where you click, how long you linger, what you almost bought, what you almost read. They build profiles. They sell audiences.

This is surveillance capitalism, and we reject it.

Laksa’s analytics track content performance, not individual behavior:

Which articles get the most clicks? ✓
Which content do readers vote as helpful? ✓
What topics generate the most engagement? ✓

But:

Following individual users across sessions? ✗
Building behavioral profiles? ✗
Selling audience data? ✗
Third-party tracking scripts? ✗

You can understand your audience without surveilling them.

Our analytics tell you what content works without treating your readers as products. We track clicks, not people. Engagement, not behavior patterns. Aggregate trends, not individual journeys.

Your readers aren’t inventory. They’re people who trusted you enough to read your work. We help you serve them better without exploiting them.

Privacy as Default, Not Marketing

GDPR compliance isn’t enough. Respect is the standard.

We comply with GDPR because we have to. But we go further because we want to:

Minimal data collection: We ask for email addresses, not life stories
No third-party trackers: Your site doesn’t leak data to dozens of ad networks
Subscriber control: One-click unsubscribe, no dark patterns
Data portability: Export your subscriber list anytime
Right to deletion: Actually implemented, not just documented

Privacy regulations are a floor, not a ceiling. We treat your subscribers’ data the way we’d want ours treated—with respect and minimal retention.

Source-Available, Commercially Licensed

Transparency without naivety.

Laksa is source-available under a commercial license. This means:

You get full access to the source code:

Study how everything works
Audit security and privacy practices
Customize it for your specific needs
No black boxes, no hidden behavior

Under a sustainable commercial model:

Licensed access to the codebase
Professional support and updates
Commercial deployment rights
Custom development available

We believe in transparency. You should be able to see exactly how your content platform works. But we also believe in sustainability—free and open source isn’t always the path to building reliable, long-term software.

Source-available gives you transparency and the ability to verify our claims. Commercial licensing gives us the resources to maintain and improve the platform for years to come.

Important: Laksa is not currently open source. During this development period, the platform is source-available under a dual licensing model: free for personal use, paid for commercial use. We may release an open source version in the future, but for now, our focus is on building a sustainable, professionally-supported platform.

Against Algorithmic Feeds

Chronological is honest. Algorithmic is manipulative.

Social platforms use algorithms to maximize engagement (read: addiction). They decide what you see based on what keeps you scrolling, not what’s actually valuable.

Laksa doesn’t have a feed algorithm because you should control what content appears where.

Your blog posts appear in chronological order. Your newsletter goes to people who explicitly subscribed. Your content doesn’t get buried by an algorithm trying to optimize for ad revenue.

We give you tools to organize and present your content. The algorithm is “what the creator published, in the order they published it.” Revolutionary, we know.

Small Teams, Big Impact

Not everything needs to be a unicorn.

The startup playbook says: grow fast, monetize users, exit big. Build a platform that locks people in, extract maximum value, sell to the highest bidder.

We’re not interested in that game.

Laksa is built for small teams managing real content:

Solo developers running technical blogs
Small publications that don’t need a million users
Agencies managing multiple client sites
Communities that want control over their platform

We don’t need to be a billion-dollar company. We need to be a sustainable product serving people who value craft over scale, ownership over convenience, and privacy over profit.

Local-First, Cloud-Optional

The best collaboration happens when you can work offline.

We’re building Laksa with a local-first approach (coming soon via laksa-cli):

Work offline: Edit content without an internet connection
Sync when ready: Push changes to the cloud on your schedule
Local preview: See changes instantly on your machine
Cloud deployment: Publish when you’re satisfied

The cloud should be a deployment target, not a requirement. Your content should live on your machine first, synchronized to the cloud second.

In Summary

Laksa is built on these principles:

Files over databases - Content as portable text files
Developer experience matters - For everyone’s benefit
True ownership - You can leave anytime
Content analytics, not surveillance - Track what works, not who reads it
Privacy by design - Respect as the default
Source-available, commercial - Transparency with sustainability
Chronological, not algorithmic - Honest presentation
Small teams over unicorns - Sustainable over explosive
Local-first - Cloud as a tool, not a prison

If these resonate with you, we’d love to have you try Laksa.

If they don’t, that’s fine too. There are plenty of platforms optimized for different values. We’re optimized for craft, ownership, and respect.

Your content, our spices.