Função muito supimpa do #SNAC que só recentemente constatei como é útil: podemos pôr no texto a ligação para uma imagem externa, que ele a transforma em anexo da "atividade" (a publicação no #ActivityPub), sem precisar armazená-la! Pode notar que essa foto do Locutus — Cap. Picard (Patrick Stewart) assimilado pelos Borg — é descarregada diretamente da Wikimedia Commons!

Não sei se outros sistemas, mesmo os que também já suportam #Markdown, fazem isso! Quem aí pode dizer?

@Chaotica Hubzilla ist da deutlich "mächtiger" ;) Aber ok, du wirst bestimmt was finden. In Sachen #ActivityPub ist ja glücklicherweise einiges in Bewegung.

#snac2 #fediverse #frugalfediverse

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' snac to 2.81 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/29032

GitHub Actions' Continuous Integration checks has passed OK, which hopefully is a good sign?

It's up to someone else with commit access to merge it.

(As a total aside, given the comam.es .es TLD; I'm guessin you're in Spain? I have tentative plans to attend the MIRA Festival [mostly to see Amnesia Scanner] in November. Albeit, that's in Barcelona and I vaguely understand there are linguistic, cultural and socio-political differences? I've never visited before; but thought I would mention it as a possibility to meet up AFK maybe!)

#snac #MacPorts #OpenSource #ActivityPub #Mastodon #NoDatabaseNeeded
#NoJavaScript #NoCookiesEither #NotMuchBullShit

If the propagate_local_purge configuration variable is set to true in server.json, purged local posts generate a Delete activity that is sent everywhere, instead of only deleted from the filesystem.

Included a small tweak to avoid being confused by implementations that return valid webfinger queries for non-account URLs (like i.e. the Wordpress ActivityPub plugin in some configurations). This helps in searching by URL.

Added Ukrainian translation (contributed by wincentbalin).

New command-line option muted, to list all MUTEd actors.

Mastodon API: Fixed metadata and follower approval flag when editing the account.

https://comam.es/what-is-snac

If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee or contributing via LiberaPay.

#snacAnnounces #FrugalFediverse

Loops Studio is built for creators, allowing you to upload new content, review and manage your posts, comments and interactions as well as view analytics!

It just one aspect of the platform that will soon launch with federation support and easy self-hosting.

Follow @loops for updates, or join https://loops.video to be one of the first to experience this 🚀

#loops #loopsStudio #tikTok #fediverse #activityPub #shortVideoSharing

Alt...

Loops Studio

Alt...

Loops Studio

Alt...

Loops Studio

Loops is built for the people, but we haven't forgot the admins.

We've added some pretty innovative features, like Pages that allow you to add/edit/publish rich pages and optionally add them to the main sidebar nav or footer and limit visibility to guests, users or both.

I appreciate your patience while we prepare Loops for you, and you'll soon see, it was worth the wait 🚀

#loops #Pages #fediverse #activitypub

Mastodon API: fixed a regression (introduced in previous version in the "boosts disappear in Tusky" fix) that interrupted timelines.

https://comam.es/what-is-snac

If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee or contributing via LiberaPay.

#snacAnnounces #FrugalFediverse

#snac2 #fediverse

Added a server-wide Webmention hook; this way, if somebody out there (that supports Webmention) links to a user or post in this instance, a notification is sent (this is the complementary of what was implemented in version 2.76).

Fixed regression while sending email via pipe on OpenBSD.

Fixed Markdown parsing when the URL has parenthesis.

Always show the 'pending follow confirmations' section if there are any (even if the toggle is off).

If a metadata value is an account handler, it's also tried to be validated (rel="me" links).

Another search by URL tweak (this time for Pixelfed links).

Mastodon API: fixed a bug that made some boosts disappear after being shown in apps like Tusky, added followed hashtags maintenance, other minor changes.

Renamed command-line actions create_list to list_create and delete_list to list_remove.

The default favicon URL can be changed from the server configuration.

New command-line option export_posts, to export all posts by a user in a JSON format compatible with the one generated by Mastodon.

The command-line options to send notes also allow an optional -r argument, to set the URL of a Fediverse post this note is a reply to.

https://comam.es/what-is-snac

If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee or contributing via LiberaPay.

#snacAnnounces #FrugalFediverse

In February 2025, I presented a topic at FOSDEM in Brussels entitled The Fediverse is Quiet — Let's Fix That! In it, I outlined several "hard problems" endemic to the fediverse, focusing on one particular complaint that is often voiced by newcomers and oldtimers alike; that the fediverse is quiet because you don't ever see the full conversation due to some design considerations made at the protocol level.

Since then there have been a number of approaches toward solving this problem, and it is worth spending the time to review the two main approaches and their pros and cons.

N.B. I have a conflict of interest in this subject as I am a proponent of one of the approaches (FEP 7888/f228) outlined below. This article should be considered an opinion piece.

Crawling of the reply tree

First discussed 15 April 2024 and merged into Mastodon core on 12 Mar 2025, @jonny@neuromatch.social pioneered this approach to "fetch all replies" by crawling the entirety of the reply tree. When presented with an object, the Mastodon service would make a call to the context endpoint, and if supported(?) would start to crawl the reply tree via the replies collection, generating a list of statuses to ingest.

This approach is advantageous for a number of reasons, most notably that inReplyTo and replies are properties that are ubiquitous among nearly all implementations and their usage tends not to differ markedly from one another.

N.B. I am not certain whether the service would crawl up the inReplyTo chain first, before expanding downwards, or whether context is set in intermediate and leaf nodes that point to the root-level object.

One disadvantage is this approach's susceptibility to network fragility. If a single node in the reply tree is temporarily or permanently inaccessible, then every branch of the reply tree emanating from that node is inaccessible as well.

Another disadvantage is the reliance on intermediate nodes for indexing the reply tree. The amount of work (CPU time, network requests, etc.) scales linearly with the size of the reply tree, and more importantly discoverability of new branches of the reply tree necessitate a re-crawl of the entire reply tree. For fast-growing trees, this may not net you a complete tree depending on when you begin crawling.

Lastly, in the ideal case, a full tree crawl would net you a complete tree with all branches and leaves. Great!

Mastodon is the sole implementor of this approach, although it is not proprietary or special to Mastodon by any means.

FEP 7888/f228, or FEP 171b/f228

Summarized by @silverpill@mitra.social in FEP f228 (as an extension of FEPs 7888 by @trwnh@mastodon.social and 171b by @mikedev@fediversity.site), this conversational backfill approach defines the concept of a "context owner" as referenced by compatible nodes in the tree. This context owner returns an OrderedCollection containing all members of the context.

A major advantage of this approach centers around the pseudo-centralization provided by the context owner. This "single source of truth" maintains the index of objects (or activities) and supplies their IDs (or signed full activities) on request. Individual implementations then retrieve the objects (or activities). It is important to note that should the context owner become inaccessible, then backfill is no longer possible to achieve. On the other hand, a dead or unresponsive intermediate node will not affect the ability of the downstream nodes to be processed.

The context owner is only able to respond with a list of objects/activities that it knows about. This does mean that downstream branches that do not propagate upwards back to the root will not be known to the context owner.

Additionally, consumers are also able to query the context owner for an index without needing to crawl the entire reply tree. The ability to de-duplicate objects at this level reduces the overall number of network requests (and CPU time from parsing retrieved objects) required, making this approach relatively more efficient.

Additional synchronization methods (via id hashsums) could be leveraged to reduce the number of network calls further.

A number of implementors follow this approach to backfill, including NodeBB, Discourse, WordPress, Frequency, Mitra, and Streams. Additional implementors like Lemmy and Piefed have expressed interest.

One technical hurdle with this approach is technical buy-in from implementors themselves. Unlike crawling a reply tree, this approach only works when the context owner supports it, and thus should be combined with various other backfill strategies as part of an overall conversational backfill solution.

Conclusion

2025 is shaping up to be an exciting year for resolving some of the harder technical and social problems endemic to the open social web/fediverse. It is this author's opinion that we may be able to make good headway towards resolving the "quiet fedi" problem with these two approaches.

It is important to note that neither approach conflicts with the other. Implementations are free to utilise multiple approaches to backfill a conversation. Both methods presented here have pros and cons, and a combination of both (or more) could be key.

Feel free to use this as a starting point for discussions regarding either approach. Does one speak to you more than the other? Are the cons of either approach significant enough for you to disregard it? What other approaches or changes could you recommend?

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/28613

I'm not sure why, but it seems as if the GitHub Continuous Integration checks are just... hanging? They were queued for a really long time and I stopped looking and when I checked again it was like "running" or whatever for 9 hours, but clearly probably nothing is actually happening.

Builds locally OK!

It's been a couple of days since I submitted that PR, and my apologies for lagging upstream as well. My life has been kinda, off.

I'll probably get around to emailing the MacPorts' dev mailing list if it still seems to be stalled and no one else beats me to it. Presumably, eventually, it will get merged!

Thanks again to you and others (e.g. dandelions, postscriptum, piefed) for the continued improvements!

#snac #OpenSource #ActivityPub #Mastodon #NoDatabaseNeeded
#NoJavaScript #NoCookiesEither #NotMuchBullShit #snacAnnounces

Hi @mikedev,
as you implemented #RFC9421 you may know - which servers in the wild use it?
#Activitypub #Http Request #Signing

I built a parser for #RFC9651 yesterday and am curious to look at other implementations/code as well. Mine so far: https://codeberg.org/mro/seppo/src/commit/a3af8ebc/test/t_angstrom.ml#L149
Would love to discuss it.

Hashtag following also allow URLs to RSS feeds of ActivityPub objects (like e.g. https://mastodon.social/tags/ThankYouTuesday).

Users can now configure a webhook to receive an HTTP POST for every notification. This can be useful for implementing bots that react to activities, like autorepliers, chatbots or interactive textual games (see snac(1) for more information).

The number of pending follow confirmations is shown next to the "people" link.

Faster performance metrics (contributed by dandelions).

Improved lowercasing in hashtags (contributed by postscriptum).

A search-by-url tweak for implementations that return 200 for invalid webfinger queries (e.g. piefed).

Mastodon API: added follow confirmation endpoints, fixed collisions in attachment file names.

Fixed potential crashes in attachment uploads.

https://comam.es/what-is-snac

If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee or contributing via LiberaPay.

#snacAnnounces #FrugalFediverse

#Oni the single user ActivityPub server, is getting some improvements on directly running it out of the box without requiring any set-up steps.

It is now available on the first run and every modification can be done afterwards using client to server #ActivityPub calls. Yay!

Reminder that there is a demo instance up, and running my sporadic blog: @marius

I'm assuming Unicode in handles is not allowed? At least by Mastodon.

This user is not able to have their content federated because the username is all Hebrew (I think?) characters!

https://comam.es/what-is-snac

If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee or contributing via LiberaPay.

#snacAnnounces #FrugalFediverse

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' snac to 2.76 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/28373

GitHub Actions Continuous Integration checks passed!

It's up to someone else with write access to merge it.

Thanks to you and dandelions and shtrophic (and anyone else I may have missed) for the continued contributions and improvements!

(these modest diffs were prepared in part while listening to "Garlic Braid" by LMNO & D-STYLES: https://d-styles.bandcamp.com/track/garlic-braid [the 1st single from the upcoming full length album: Three Mimes & an Elephant)

#snac #MacPorts #OpenSource #ActivityPub #Mastodon #NoDatabaseNeeded
#NoJavaScript #NoCookiesEither #NotMuchBullShit #snacAnnounces

Added Webmention support for links (Markdown-style or direct) written in a post.

Added new command-line options for list maintenance.

Display custom emoji in more places (contributed by dandelions).

Mastodon API: fixed infinite scroll in many clients (thanks to cheeaun for giving me the clue), added /api/v1/accounts/.../lists endpoint (contributed by dandelions).

Email notifications can now be sent via libcurl SMTP instead of spawning the /usr/sbin/sendmail program. To use this new feature, some additional server configuration is needed, see snac(8) (contributed by shtrophic).

https://comam.es/what-is-snac

If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee or contributing via LiberaPay.

#snacAnnounces

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' snac to 2.75 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/28174

GitHub Continuous Integration checks passed OK!

It's up to someone else with commit access to merge it.

Thanks to you, shtrophic and everyone else who helped make improvements for this release!

#snac #MacPorts #OpenSource #ActivityPub #Mastodon #NoDatabaseNeeded
#NoJavaScript #NoCookiesEither #NotMuchBullShit #snacAnnounces

Added support for scheduled posts (for this to work correctly, users will have to set their time zone, see below).

The user can now select a working time zone. This will be used to correctly parse the local date and time of a scheduled post.

Fixed incorrect poll vote format, which was causing problems in platforms like GotoSocial.

Mastodon API: added support for /api/v1/instance/peers.

Added a new snac-admin helper script (contributed by shtrophic).

In the web UI, posts are separated by the <hr hidden> tag; it's invisible in graphical browsers, but it separates post clearly in text-based browsers.

Some Finnish, Spanish, Czech and Russian translation updates and fixes.

https://comam.es/what-is-snac

If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee or contributing via LiberaPay.

#snacAnnounces

This release has been inspired by the song Pictures on the Wall by #MichelleGurevich.

A reasonable ActivityPub / ActivityStreams API to schedule something to be posted in the future might be — to HTTP POST something to an account's outbox with the `published` field set to a date-time in the future.

#ActivityPub #ActivityStreams #DeSo #FediDev #FediDevs #Fediverse

What is the standard method of specifying primary language of a post in #ActivityPub?

Mastodon and Hollo add contentMap.[languageCode] to object. But Pleroma and Misskey don't.
And what if there are multiple keys in contentMap?

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/27956

3/3 of GitHub Continuous Integration checks completed successfully!

Thanks to you (and gnemmi, pmjv, daltux, inz, Popolon, sn4il, mistivia, zen, Menel, uhuru, anzu, violette, and rozenglass; hopefully I didn't miss anyone?) for the continued improvements!

As with previous PRs I have submitted, I am abstaining from commit access until I have less chaos in my life to be able to take on more responsibilities, so it's up to someone else to merge it.

#snac #MacPorts #OpenSource #ActivityPub #Mastodon #NoDatabaseNeeded
#NoJavaScript #NoCookiesEither #NotMuchBullShit #snacAnnounces

Added Spanish (default, Argentina and Uruguay) translation (contributed by gnemmi).

Added Czech translation (contributed by pmjv).

Added Brazilian Portuguese translation (contributed by daltux).

Added Finnish translation (contributed by inz).

Added French translation (contributed by Popolon).

Added Russian translation (contributed by sn4il).

Added Chinese translation (contributed by mistivia).

Added German translation (contributed by zen and Menel).

Added Greek translation (contributed by uhuru).

Added Italian translation (contributed by anzu).

Mastodon API: added support for /api/v1/custom_emojis (contributed by violette).

Improved Undo+Follow logic (contributed by rozenglass).

Reverted (temporarily) the Markdown code that converted text between underscores to italics, because it was causing more problems that what it was worth.

Fixed bug in bookmark CSV import.

Don't indent Twitter-like "threads" (i.e. chains of short posts from the same author that are self-replies).

https://comam.es/what-is-snac

If you find #snac useful, please consider contributing via LiberaPay: https://liberapay.com/grunfink/

#snacAnnounces

You, people, are GREAT. Thank you very much.

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/27816

3 out of 3 GitHub Continuous Integration checks passed already! (I guess whatever was slowing down that third one got resolved somehow?)

Thanks to you and inz for the continued improvements!

It's up to someone else with commit access to merge it.

#snac #MacPorts #OpenSource #ActivityPub #Mastodon #NoDatabaseNeeded
#NoJavaScript #NoCookiesEither #NotMuchBullShit #snacAnnounces

Added support for customizing and translating the web UI language via simple .po files. For more information on how to install language files or create new ones, please see snac(8) (the administrator manual).

New user support for blocking hashtags from the web UI.

The Content-Security-Policy HTTP header is now always sent to disable any JavaScript, instead of just being suggested in the documentation.

Image attachments in SVG format are now disabled by default; you can enable them back by setting the enable_svg value to true in server.json.

Several fixes (contributed by inz).

https://comam.es/what-is-snac

If you find #snac useful, please consider contributing via LiberaPay: https://liberapay.com/grunfink/

#snacAnnounces

Just published a guide on setting up Snac on an Ubuntu VM using NGINX Proxy Manager. Snac is an incredibly lightweight #ActivityPub server. A true nom nom among fediverse platforms.

If you're curious about minimal fediverse instances, check it out:

https://box464.com/posts/snac-activitypub-on-ubuntu/

#tutorial #selfhosted #fediverse #activitypub #snac #snac2