7 ms·

Microblog.pub – A self-hosted, single-user, ActivityPub powered microblog

212 points by nafnlj 4y ago

p4bl0 4y ago
I was looking for something exactly like this a few weeks ago! Thanks for sharing!
cetra3 4y ago
> Uses SQLite, and no external dependencies except Python 3.10+ I don't know if it's the way it's been written, but it reads to me that only python is needed, no libraries. I'm assuming this isn't true though: I can see a lot of libraries: https://github.com/tsileo/microblog.pub/blob/v2/pyproject.toml https://github.com/tsileo/microblog.pub/blob/v2/pyproject.to...
- dabedee 4y ago
  I assume the author means "no [system-level] external dependencies except Python 3.10+ [in order to install the software]". Python then installs the required application-level dependencies.
- kixiQu 4y ago
  I would have guessed that it means something like "you know how you need to get postgres, redis, and elasticsearch up for a good mastodon install? none of those"
  - csande17 4y ago
    Yeah, when the author writes "external" I think they mean "runs outside the Python interpreter process".
    - atoav 4y ago
      Probably, but these are external dependencies. Whether they are python dependencies or not wouldn't change that. If someone writes "no external dependencies except Python 3.10" I'd expect that thing to run out of the box on any system that has Python 3.10 on it. The developer promised after all that this was the only dependency. When I realize that there are in fact a heap of external python modules you need to install, I loose a lot of trust in the proficiency of the project. No external dependencies means that you just use the standard python interpreter and you maintain all the code you are using (outside of what the language provides). No external dependencies speaks of a willingness to go the extra mile to reduce size, make the thing universally runnable and easy to install and to avoid having random (potentially unchecked) code running inside your project. So it is a statement to make. Most projects I work on have external dependencies, but I: A.) try to keep them to a minimum and only rely on vetted and tested ones and B.) I don't claim there are no external dependencies
      - tsileo 4y ago
        (author here) I see the confusion, I tweaked the README to remove that claim. But I indeed meant "no external dependencies like postgres/redis..".
        littlestymaar 4y ago
        No system-wide dependencies maybe ? I personally value a lot not having to install stuff by hand on my system, hoping for the version of the said dependencies in my OS package manager end up working with the software I want to use. Using dependencies managed by the language dependency manager removes 99% of the dependency hassle. (Yes, I know I could install an complete second distro in docker and run the software there. But I won't, thank you).
        magicalhippo 4y ago
        Perhaps "does not depend on any external services, like posgresql or redis"?
  - dspillett 4y ago
    So the usual pile of library dependencies, but no service dependencies. It is like talking about storage fragmentation: one layer's internal fragmentation is the next's external fragmentation.
- jinseokim 4y ago
  I feel like Python 3.10 is large dependency -- almost no one would use it unless required.
  - b1ue64 4y ago
    Python is already included on most Linux systems
  - atoav 4y ago
    Python 3.10 is standard even in the latest debian version, nearly every Linux that you would setup today has python >=3.9 preinstalled. Unless you use some sort of "webspace" type of provider that only allows PHP, this should not be an issue (in fact I had a webspace once and it too had python, I just had to ask). So python 3.10 is not an external dependency here, because external implies you need to install it. But all the non-standard python modules used (humanize, ...) are definitly external dependencies and that can be an issue if you try to run your service in such a restricted environment.
patchtopic 4y ago
I was just trying to "follow" from a mastodon instance and nothing seems to happen.. though I'm not exactly sure what should happen.
- zaik 4y ago
  Do you see their posts in your feed?
  - cxr 4y ago
    There's definitely some weirdness with the @t@hexa.ninja account given as an example of an instance in the wild. Loading that in Mastodon's "Web" says it contains "4 posts", but consulting the "Posts and replies" tab will reveal the contents of 5 posts. Meanwhile, this number is about half of the expected number, based on the posts that are actually visible on the <https://hexa.ninja/ https://hexa.ninja/> landing page (i.e. as viewed in e.g. Firefox).
    - ajayyy 4y ago
      ActivityPub does not handle old posts. This post number is the number of posts since at least one person on that instance followed them. Before that, the instance didn't know they existed ActivityPub is a publisher/subscriber protocol
      - mariusor 4y ago
        > ActivityPub does not handle old posts. That is incorrect. Mastodon is the one doesn't handle old posts[1], because they insist on presenting to the user only what has already been federated with it. See [2] for a more in-depth explanation. If they would use the protocol as intended, and actually perform requests on the remote Outbox collection when the user wants to view the posts of a remote actor, there would be no issue. [1] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/14017 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/14017 [2] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/14017#issuecomment-642177335 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/14017#issuecomme...
MikeYasnev007 4y ago
palata 4y ago
I don't get what it does. Is ActivityPub used like some kind of RSS feed that people can follow?
- wmf 4y ago
  It's a decentralized Twitter clone.
  - spookie 4y ago
    That's an extremely short sighted opinion. ActivityPub is an extremely versatile protocol that resembles a lot like speech. Some guy made a bunch of "smart" devices communicate with eachother through his own GNU social instance. Essentially making his house a "smart" home.
    - preseinger 4y ago
      ActivityPub and GNU Social users! There are dozens of us, Michael, dozens!
      - Aeolun 4y ago
        It’s not very surprising. I was looking around for an easy way to set up anythi g using ActivityPub using a single docker instance, and all the big players are ‘check out from source and run directly on your server’. No thanks.
        d1sxeyes 4y ago
        TFA seems to link to a Docker image? I think there are probably two main groups interested in ActivityPub. The 80% will want to just register on someone else's instance. The rest are nerds who will set up their instances for fun, and will not be massively hindered by the lack of simple set-up options. I would guess that users like you ('curious, but not invested') would likely not gravitate to ActivityPub anyway, and almost certainly not to hosting your own instance.
      - 4y ago
johntash 4y ago
I saw that mastodon.technology is shutting down soon. Would this microblog.pub be a good alternative to hosting my own mastodon? I don't have any other users, so it'd just be for me to maybe interact with people on other mastodon instances.
- riffic 4y ago
  hosting a full-blown mastodon for a single user instance is extremely overkill. if you have access to a LAMP like your typical shared hosting provider, you could try Gnu Social or WordPress with the AP plugin.
  - johntash 4y ago
    I agree, I started looking at setting up a mastodon instance and didn't get very far before looking at alternatives. Thanks for the suggestion. I don't really want to run another Wordpress, but Gnu Social looks promising.
    - huimang 4y ago
      Check out pleroma. It uses much less resources than mastodon so it’s been nice as a single user instance.
      - ConfuSomu 4y ago
        And GoToSocial is also a nice alternative to Mastodon
      - zimpenfish 4y ago
        If you want even lower resource usage, try honk[1] (currently using about 80M whilst my Pleroma is using 350M + 500M from Postgres) (although it is considerably more minimal than Pleroma...) [1] https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk
        4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
anderspitman 4y ago
Application-wise this looks awesome. I would love to see way more people using something like this. The problem is self-hosting is too difficult for the average person. But that doesn't have to be the case. Self-hosting shouldn't be any more complicated or less secure than installing an app on your phone. You shouldn't need to understand DNS, TLS, NAT, HTTP, TCP, UDP, etc, etc. Domain names shouldn't be any more difficult to buy or use than phone numbers. Apps should be sandboxed in KVM/WHPX/HVP-accelerated virtual machines that run on Windows, Mac, and Linux and are secure-by-default. Tunneling out to the public internet should be a quick OAuth flow that lets you connect a given app to a specific subdomain, with TLS certs automatically obtained from Let's Encrypt and stored locally for end-to-end encryption.
- kitd 4y ago
  All of which is why SaaS is a thing, no?
  - kthejoker2 4y ago
    SaaS and self-hosting seem mutually exclusive, no? At least as envisioned in these requirements.
- noirscape 4y ago
  In theory this is already the case; Self-hosting only really requires understanding DNS and the basics of running a Unix system if you just rent a VPS at say, Hetzner. Similarly, buying domain names is as easy as buying a phone number, probably even easier since ID legislation surrounding phone numbers is much stricter. NAT, TCP and UDP don't come into play unless you also plan on self-hosting your IP assignments or need to configure the firewall, which most people don't need to do (firewalls for webservers are usually already set up by the distro from my experience.) The problem is that the rest of the process is poorly documented (really... anything surrounding HTTPS; webservers require setting arcane config flags that all make sense once explained but why aren't distros just shipping sane SSL snippets that aim to get a good SSLLabs score/maintain older browser compat as needed, pretty much all these configs are shared across systems, certbot is cool but good luck parsing the documentation and woe be onto you if you do DNS-level verification with an unofficial plugin, the docs are all over the place) which creates this faux idea that you need to be a massive tech nerd to even begin self-hosting. The closest thing most people can follow is setting up shop at a shared hosting provider with a one-click WordPress installation (or other apps fitting in an AMP stack). That has been automated to the point where the enduser can reliably do it, but that pushes the limit of what you can really consider self-hosting.
rambambram 4y ago
Shameless plug: use HeyHomepage.com with it's Really Social Sites (RSS) functionality. As easy as Wordpress to setup. Already millions of feeds one can subscribe to. A goodlooking website with your own timeline, which you can also use to share (and therefor 'curate') other interesting RSS posts.
dmje 4y ago
Why not just use WordPress? If you're technical, self host using wordpress.org. If you're not, or don't want the hassle, host using wordpress.com. If you do need the ActivityPub side of stuff you can install a plugin [0]. [0] https://indieweb.org/WordPress_ActivityPub_plugin https://indieweb.org/WordPress_ActivityPub_plugin
dethos 4y ago
This looks great. Mastodon is not a good choice for a "single-user instance". It has been a pain and a waste of resources, running it for the last few years. If the migration process is easy (and keeps all the previous data), I will definitely consider the move.

212 points by nafnlj 4y ago

I was looking for something exactly like this a few weeks ago! Thanks for sharing!

> Uses SQLite, and no external dependencies except Python 3.10+ I don't know if it's the way it's been written, but it reads to me that only python is needed, no libraries. I'm assuming this isn't true though: I can see a lot of libraries: https://github.com/tsileo/microblog.pub/blob/v2/pyproject.toml https://github.com/tsileo/microblog.pub/blob/v2/pyproject.to...

dabedee 4y ago
I assume the author means "no [system-level] external dependencies except Python 3.10+ [in order to install the software]". Python then installs the required application-level dependencies.
kixiQu 4y ago
I would have guessed that it means something like "you know how you need to get postgres, redis, and elasticsearch up for a good mastodon install? none of those"
- csande17 4y ago
  Yeah, when the author writes "external" I think they mean "runs outside the Python interpreter process".
  - atoav 4y ago
    Probably, but these are external dependencies. Whether they are python dependencies or not wouldn't change that. If someone writes "no external dependencies except Python 3.10" I'd expect that thing to run out of the box on any system that has Python 3.10 on it. The developer promised after all that this was the only dependency. When I realize that there are in fact a heap of external python modules you need to install, I loose a lot of trust in the proficiency of the project. No external dependencies means that you just use the standard python interpreter and you maintain all the code you are using (outside of what the language provides). No external dependencies speaks of a willingness to go the extra mile to reduce size, make the thing universally runnable and easy to install and to avoid having random (potentially unchecked) code running inside your project. So it is a statement to make. Most projects I work on have external dependencies, but I: A.) try to keep them to a minimum and only rely on vetted and tested ones and B.) I don't claim there are no external dependencies
    - tsileo 4y ago
      (author here) I see the confusion, I tweaked the README to remove that claim. But I indeed meant "no external dependencies like postgres/redis..".
      - littlestymaar 4y ago
        No system-wide dependencies maybe ? I personally value a lot not having to install stuff by hand on my system, hoping for the version of the said dependencies in my OS package manager end up working with the software I want to use. Using dependencies managed by the language dependency manager removes 99% of the dependency hassle. (Yes, I know I could install an complete second distro in docker and run the software there. But I won't, thank you).
      - magicalhippo 4y ago
        Perhaps "does not depend on any external services, like posgresql or redis"?
- dspillett 4y ago
  So the usual pile of library dependencies, but no service dependencies. It is like talking about storage fragmentation: one layer's internal fragmentation is the next's external fragmentation.
jinseokim 4y ago
I feel like Python 3.10 is large dependency -- almost no one would use it unless required.
- b1ue64 4y ago
  Python is already included on most Linux systems
- atoav 4y ago
  Python 3.10 is standard even in the latest debian version, nearly every Linux that you would setup today has python >=3.9 preinstalled. Unless you use some sort of "webspace" type of provider that only allows PHP, this should not be an issue (in fact I had a webspace once and it too had python, I just had to ask). So python 3.10 is not an external dependency here, because external implies you need to install it. But all the non-standard python modules used (humanize, ...) are definitly external dependencies and that can be an issue if you try to run your service in such a restricted environment.

patchtopic 4y ago

I was just trying to "follow" from a mastodon instance and nothing seems to happen.. though I'm not exactly sure what should happen.

zaik 4y ago
Do you see their posts in your feed?
- cxr 4y ago
  There's definitely some weirdness with the @t@hexa.ninja account given as an example of an instance in the wild. Loading that in Mastodon's "Web" says it contains "4 posts", but consulting the "Posts and replies" tab will reveal the contents of 5 posts. Meanwhile, this number is about half of the expected number, based on the posts that are actually visible on the <https://hexa.ninja/ https://hexa.ninja/> landing page (i.e. as viewed in e.g. Firefox).
  - ajayyy 4y ago
    ActivityPub does not handle old posts. This post number is the number of posts since at least one person on that instance followed them. Before that, the instance didn't know they existed ActivityPub is a publisher/subscriber protocol
    - mariusor 4y ago
      > ActivityPub does not handle old posts. That is incorrect. Mastodon is the one doesn't handle old posts[1], because they insist on presenting to the user only what has already been federated with it. See [2] for a more in-depth explanation. If they would use the protocol as intended, and actually perform requests on the remote Outbox collection when the user wants to view the posts of a remote actor, there would be no issue. [1] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/14017 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/14017 [2] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/14017#issuecomment-642177335 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/14017#issuecomme...

MikeYasnev007 4y ago

palata 4y ago

I don't get what it does. Is ActivityPub used like some kind of RSS feed that people can follow?

wmf 4y ago
It's a decentralized Twitter clone.
- spookie 4y ago
  That's an extremely short sighted opinion. ActivityPub is an extremely versatile protocol that resembles a lot like speech. Some guy made a bunch of "smart" devices communicate with eachother through his own GNU social instance. Essentially making his house a "smart" home.
  - preseinger 4y ago
    ActivityPub and GNU Social users! There are dozens of us, Michael, dozens!
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      It’s not very surprising. I was looking around for an easy way to set up anythi g using ActivityPub using a single docker instance, and all the big players are ‘check out from source and run directly on your server’. No thanks.
      - d1sxeyes 4y ago
        TFA seems to link to a Docker image? I think there are probably two main groups interested in ActivityPub. The 80% will want to just register on someone else's instance. The rest are nerds who will set up their instances for fun, and will not be massively hindered by the lack of simple set-up options. I would guess that users like you ('curious, but not invested') would likely not gravitate to ActivityPub anyway, and almost certainly not to hosting your own instance.
    - 4y ago

johntash 4y ago

I saw that mastodon.technology is shutting down soon. Would this microblog.pub be a good alternative to hosting my own mastodon? I don't have any other users, so it'd just be for me to maybe interact with people on other mastodon instances.

riffic 4y ago
hosting a full-blown mastodon for a single user instance is extremely overkill. if you have access to a LAMP like your typical shared hosting provider, you could try Gnu Social or WordPress with the AP plugin.
- johntash 4y ago
  I agree, I started looking at setting up a mastodon instance and didn't get very far before looking at alternatives. Thanks for the suggestion. I don't really want to run another Wordpress, but Gnu Social looks promising.
  - huimang 4y ago
    Check out pleroma. It uses much less resources than mastodon so it’s been nice as a single user instance.
    - ConfuSomu 4y ago
      And GoToSocial is also a nice alternative to Mastodon
    - zimpenfish 4y ago
      If you want even lower resource usage, try honk[1] (currently using about 80M whilst my Pleroma is using 350M + 500M from Postgres) (although it is considerably more minimal than Pleroma...) [1] https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk
      - 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

anderspitman 4y ago

Application-wise this looks awesome. I would love to see way more people using something like this. The problem is self-hosting is too difficult for the average person. But that doesn't have to be the case. Self-hosting shouldn't be any more complicated or less secure than installing an app on your phone. You shouldn't need to understand DNS, TLS, NAT, HTTP, TCP, UDP, etc, etc. Domain names shouldn't be any more difficult to buy or use than phone numbers. Apps should be sandboxed in KVM/WHPX/HVP-accelerated virtual machines that run on Windows, Mac, and Linux and are secure-by-default. Tunneling out to the public internet should be a quick OAuth flow that lets you connect a given app to a specific subdomain, with TLS certs automatically obtained from Let's Encrypt and stored locally for end-to-end encryption.

kitd 4y ago
All of which is why SaaS is a thing, no?
- kthejoker2 4y ago
  SaaS and self-hosting seem mutually exclusive, no? At least as envisioned in these requirements.
noirscape 4y ago
In theory this is already the case; Self-hosting only really requires understanding DNS and the basics of running a Unix system if you just rent a VPS at say, Hetzner. Similarly, buying domain names is as easy as buying a phone number, probably even easier since ID legislation surrounding phone numbers is much stricter. NAT, TCP and UDP don't come into play unless you also plan on self-hosting your IP assignments or need to configure the firewall, which most people don't need to do (firewalls for webservers are usually already set up by the distro from my experience.) The problem is that the rest of the process is poorly documented (really... anything surrounding HTTPS; webservers require setting arcane config flags that all make sense once explained but why aren't distros just shipping sane SSL snippets that aim to get a good SSLLabs score/maintain older browser compat as needed, pretty much all these configs are shared across systems, certbot is cool but good luck parsing the documentation and woe be onto you if you do DNS-level verification with an unofficial plugin, the docs are all over the place) which creates this faux idea that you need to be a massive tech nerd to even begin self-hosting. The closest thing most people can follow is setting up shop at a shared hosting provider with a one-click WordPress installation (or other apps fitting in an AMP stack). That has been automated to the point where the enduser can reliably do it, but that pushes the limit of what you can really consider self-hosting.

rambambram 4y ago

Shameless plug: use HeyHomepage.com with it's Really Social Sites (RSS) functionality. As easy as Wordpress to setup. Already millions of feeds one can subscribe to. A goodlooking website with your own timeline, which you can also use to share (and therefor 'curate') other interesting RSS posts.

dmje 4y ago

Why not just use WordPress? If you're technical, self host using wordpress.org. If you're not, or don't want the hassle, host using wordpress.com. If you do need the ActivityPub side of stuff you can install a plugin [0]. [0] https://indieweb.org/WordPress_ActivityPub_plugin https://indieweb.org/WordPress_ActivityPub_plugin

dethos 4y ago

This looks great. Mastodon is not a good choice for a "single-user instance". It has been a pain and a waste of resources, running it for the last few years. If the migration process is easy (and keeps all the previous data), I will definitely consider the move.