HACKER Q&A
📣 fariszr

Which ActivityPub software to use for a personal server?


So with Elons stupidity ruining Twitter, it seems to be really happening this time, people, and content creators (Tweeters?) are moving to Mastodon for real.

I am not very optimistic about Mastodon, particularly for these reasons:

- crappy inter-instance user discovery

A user won't show up in search or the federated timeline unless a local user follows them.

It basically makes it impossible to get discovered when using your own independent instance.

Even if you interact and reply to a user in instance B, you will still not show in instances B search or federated timeline.

I found this diagram to be helpful in explaining which users show in the federated timeline:

https://imgbox.com/V7rZ6i2q

- no way to see other instances timelines

This makes its even worse to discover accounts when launching your own server.

- no backfill for old toots[1-2]

This is just ridiculous.

But it seems to be where everyone technical is going, and since it's a federated protocol, If I am going to use it, it's going to be on my own server.

So far I have seen three main Recommendations for hosting Activity Pub

- Mastodon (obviously)

- Misskey

- Pleroma

My use case is a personal server, just for me.

I want something reliable, and easy to maintain, because figuring out how to migrate to another platform later-on isn't fun.

Which one do you recommend?

Misskey looks to be the most interesting one.

You can create lists, follow other instances local timelines, supports reactions, remove the character limit, etc. but Mobile app support is limited, PWA is the only option.

But I don't want to end up using something unpopular, where the development is going to be rather sparse.

1. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/14017

2. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/34

  👤 somat Accepted Answer ✓
For personal use, I would recommend Ted Unangst's honk.

https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk

But that is mainly because I value straightforward installation and simple administration. So that converges well with honk. If you(or your users) value features more you will probably want to use something else. but you will suffer when it comes time to administer the thing.

👤 0x0000000
Admittedly I don't use social media like most people, but I dont understand the "discovery problem", personally. I've never wondered "how do I discover user email addresses?" for example. Don't you already have friends or folks you're interested in following? Can't you ask them what their ActivityPub instance/identity is? Once you have even a small network, can't you see the folks who interact with those you're already following?

I don't mean for this to sound callous or dismissive, I'm just wondering if y'all can help me understand where you're coming from. Is it FOMO? An issue of optimization? I feel like time and attention is already limited and the last thing I need is to find more things on which to waste either.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, perhaps consider a more organic approach? Even on HN we see threads like "what are your favorite youtube channels?" from time to time, despite that one major draw to YouTube is the "discoverability" (it's one reason why folks post content there instead of on their own site, no?)

👤 voigt
I think it’s worth to check out https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial It’s far from „done“ and has a lot of rough edges, but it’s easy to setup and probably good enough for a single instance!
👤 tonyarkles
In a similar vein, I grew up in the era of Carmack .plan files and have always wanted to set something up for myself. There is a webfinger protocol but it suffers from the discovery problem (how do I even consider looking for one on a random host?!)

Is ActivityPub appropriate? It seems like it, especially with the “honk” system discussed here, but I’m curious if anyone else has tried this or if there’s better alternatives? I’ve also considered… that modern version of Gopher, but it has an accessibility problem for all but super dorks (which, honestly, probably isn’t too big of an issue for the kinds of people who would be interested in what I’m working on)

👤 chc4
Use Pleroma. It's much easier to setup and better architectured technically. Also all(?) ActivityPub servers support the old Twitter API, so some third party Twitter apps have support for it - Twidere on Android definitely does, at least.
👤 jaimehrubiks
Great discussion, would love to see more information about the topic. It's definitely a good time for these three activitypub federated platforms to start getting more users.
👤 the-printer
Honk, obviously.
👤 barbarbar
It sounds like you should use twitter.