2022-07-03
Fediverse
In the course of my search for a good Activity Pub server, I found that there are a number of options in development. Here's a curated list. I was specifically looking for an option that expressed the KISS principle (was simple to install, use, maintain) and geared towards single users.
Among the options that I'm looking at are:
Epicyon:
But I've left a question on GitLab for Bob Mottram on whether it work would on Apache.
GNU Social
GNUSocial was not designed to use Activity Pub, but, led by a developer at the University of Porto, the platform is being modernized and an Activity Pub plugin has been added. My suspicion is that it is not being developed all that quickly, there are more than a hundred active issues. The advantage of GNUSocial is that it uses older technology, like PHP, and is fairly easy to install. I've done it a couple of times already. But I was never very inspired by it, actually.
Ktistec https://github.com/toddsundsted/ktistec :
"Ktistec is an ActivityPub (https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/) server. It is intended for individual users, not farms of users, although support for additional users will be added in the future. It is designed to have few runtime dependencies – for example, it uses SQLite as its database, instead of PostgreSQL + Redis + etc. It is licensed under the AGPLv3."
Microblog Pub https://github.com/tsileo/microblog.pub
"A self-hosted, single-user, ActivityPub powered microblog. - still in early development, and not yet recommended to run an instance.
Gotosocial - a backend server for the activity pub protocol - for which you need a front end client
https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial
There are a couple of others. Unless Bob Mottram has a positive response, I will probably go with GNU Social again
Zap
There is also Zap; which uses the Zot protocol of Mike McGirvan, but supports Activity Pub. It is basically a less complex version of Hubzilla, with Articles, Wikis, etc. stripped out. I know that the installation is not too difficult, and it the code is basically php. It is true that it uses a database.
Besides simplicity, I think I also like the Linux principle of choosing tools that don't try to do too much. That way, if one finds a better tool, it is possible to swap out that tool, which is not the case if everything depends upon a single platform. I think the main components for my "digital garden" are blog, photo galleries, some form of a wiki and a social network. Additional possibilities are bookmarks, a links blog, and cloud storage for documents.
Digital gardens
Meanwhile, while doing a search for fediverse servers, I found more resources on digial gardens:
- "Everything I know" - https://wiki.nikiv.dev
- "My blog is a digital garden, not a blog" https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden
- A Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/DigitalGardens/
- curated list of digital gardens: https://github.com/lyz-code/best-of-digital-gardens
This blog
I have figured out a way, I think, of using Org-Static-Blog to differentiate between regular articles and blog-style chronological posts: The blog-style posts will begin with a date. The articles will have a proper title and be assigned a tag or tags. That way, I can create links in the menu to that tag. At a later stage, when I become more proficient with Lisp, I could process the articles separately, and create an alphateical listing for them.