We're not standing still! Citadel is an active project with big plans and big improvements going on behind the scenes. But it isn't always apparent, from just looking at the current releases, what we're up to. So here's a peek at some highlights from our development roadmap.
The vast majority of our development effort is going towards a complete overhaul of our WebCit user interface. This is a fully REST/DAV implementation with a modern single-page user interface. Here is an example of the "forum" app:
And here's the "mail" app:
Here's an early preview of the "calendar" app:
We think you'll be very pleased!
Site operators have requested support for storage backends beyond Berkeley DB. This demand stems partly from a desire to distance the open-source community from Oracle following its acquisition of Sleepycat Software and subsequent licensing changes. Additionally, some operators have reported technical difficulties with the current implementation.
Citadel began with flat files in 1981, then changed to GDBM in 1998 and added Berkeley DB in 2002. During the summer of 2023 we made some big improvements to our storage layer, to allow us to add swappable storage back ends. In the process, we ended up doing some bug fixes that made the Berkeley DB driver more stable than ever! In fact, we were unable to break it even when we tried; and there have been ZERO reports of database corruption since version 993 was released in September 2023.
We are pleased to report that support for LMDB became available in the summer of 2026. It is now the default store for new sites, and makes excellent use of storage. This will only be practical on 64-bit systems, so the Berkeley DB store will remain available for 32-bit systems, and for sites which have an existing database and do not wish to convert.
We envision a future where Citadel sites can optionally become first class nodes on distributed/federated networks. This will allow public sites to reach a wider audience and improve the state of the independent and sovereign web. Early plans involved ActivityPub, but the distributed censorship in effect on that network has led us to consider Nostr instead. If you're interested in this type of thing, log in and get involved!