Dear friends of #BSDCafe and the #Fediverse,
since December 2023, snac.bsd.cafe has been operational, initially in an experimental phase but has proven to be stable and reliable.
Thus, Snac2 is now available as a service of BSD Cafe. It is considered one of the best and most comprehensive "lightweight" implementations of #ActivityPub, offering one of the best ways to interact with the Fediverse without the need for the extensive dependencies and components of Mastodon.
It is now possible to request an account on the snac2 instance of BSD Cafe. There isn't an automatic sign-up process (snac2 does not provide one, as it wasn't designed to create large communities).
If you're looking to host your very own single-user/a-few-users #fediverse instance, you cannot go wrong with #snac. It is simple to install on Ubuntu and works very well with some really solid clients. It is also written in C, so it is fast, with few dependencies. Great work @grunfink, you've got a new monthly supporter on Ko-fi!
snac2 has reached version 2.44, which is stable and undoubtedly suitable for more comprehensive use.
In the coming days, I'll likely declare this instance as stable and include it in BSD Cafe's services. Plurality and choice are fundamental in a free world.
I want to publicly thank @grunfink for creating the amazing snac2, which powers my instance.
They've read everything I noted, suggested changes, and adapted the code to make it work optimally even on my slow VM. If all open source developers were as kind and helpful as they have been with me, the world would be an idyllic place.
A shoutout to @stefano too - using snac2 was his idea, and he's responsible for the technical implementation of the instance.
And thanks to everyone who makes my timeline interesting and complete - without you, all of this would be utterly pointless.
Dear friends of #BSDCafe and the #Fediverse,
since December 2023, snac.bsd.cafe has been operational, initially in an experimental phase but has proven to be stable and reliable.
Thus, Snac2 is now available as a service of BSD Cafe. It is considered one of the best and most comprehensive "lightweight" implementations of #ActivityPub, offering one of the best ways to interact with the Fediverse without the need for the extensive dependencies and components of Mastodon.
It is now possible to request an account on the snac2 instance of BSD Cafe. There isn't an automatic sign-up process (snac2 does not provide one, as it wasn't designed to create large communities).
With the latest commit, @grunfink has resolved the problem that was causing the #snac2 performance issue. The threads had stopped working, but now they are performing as expected.
Snac2 is improving every day, and I believe it is evolving into one of the best low-footprint solutions to be a part of the #Fediverse
HowTo install your own ActivityPub instance for the Fediverse based on snac2 on your #FreeBSD system. Snac2 is a simple, minimalistic ActivityPub instance written in portable C.
Evening thoughts: Since I started talking about #snac2, some BSD Cafe users have set up their own instances and begun using them.
Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned it.
The number of instances based on #snac2 has been on the rise in recent days.
When looking at the statistics, it appears that the (still in testing) instance of BSD Cafe is currently the most populous.
Can I proudly say we're the largest #Fediverse (snac) instance? 😉
The first day of using #snac2 is coming to an end. Here are my observations:
It benefits greatly from ZFS and its compression. Performance is much better compared to an equivalent VM with OpenBSD.
Enafore and Phanpy work well. I appreciate Enafore's ability to hide replies and boosts (which Mastodon allows natively and also reflects in the API results). As for Phanpy, I like its interface. Of course, not everything works since the Mastodon API is only partially implemented, but the essentials are there. I especially like its integrated interface for threaded replies and notification display.
The "everything is a file" approach is very interesting. Even queues are treated as files, making it easy to monitor what's happening.
There are no character limits, and Markdown is natively supported - which is rendered correctly by Mastodon as well.
I believe that with larger numbers, Mastodon can show significantly better performance, mainly due to the separation of queue management and the web interface, as well as caching with Redis. I'm not sure how it would behave with 100 users connected simultaneously, reading everything from files and directories (perhaps better than I imagine), but this project isn't designed for large numbers. It doesn't aim to compete with Mastodon but to demonstrate that, without dependencies and high hardware requirements, one can successfully manage a node in the Fediverse.
In short, a decidedly positive experience that I will continue to delve into in the coming days.
Congratulations for the very good result, @grunfink !
"This document is dedicated to all citizens of planet Earth. You deserve freedom of communication; we hope we have contributed in some part, however small, towards that goal and right."
This morning I installed and briefly tested an ipv6 only snac2 instance.
As expected, everything works perfectly - of course it just federates with ipv6-enabled instances.
Tonight, the snac.bsd.cafe instance will run from here. The Raspberry PI 4's internal SD is in read only, while the disk is ZFS, with #BastilleBSD managing the snac jail.
I am just so amazed at how well the @phanpy web client works with #snac. I started self-hosting phanpy last night (it is a pure static web app) and it works seamlessly. Makes me very happy when things go like they're expected. Thank you for this @cheeaun!
Today, I'll be conducting more experiments with snac2. Until yesterday, I had been running it with 16 threads.
Today, I'll try with 32 to observe the load and how it responds when posting while simultaneously using the web interface. With 16 threads, there was a (slight) slowdown during queue processing; let's see if things change with 32.
I'll also delve into some more niche aspects - I've noticed a couple of details regarding boosts that don't always seem to be displayed by Mastodon (a behavior I've also encountered on Pixelfed).
I'll investigate.
Here at Emacs.ch we run an experimental side instance [1] based on Snac2 [2], which is a Mastodon-compatible Fediverse server written in C, runs completly file-based and features a zero-JS UI.
It doesn't have many of the fancy features of Mastodon, but is a bright example of how a super-minimal system can do the job very well. It'll also work with your mobile Mastodon apps and small browsers like Dillo[3].
It runs on OpenBSD and we accept a few more testers. There is no automatic sign-up, so if you are interested, DM me with the desired account name and I'll send you the credentials.
For those, like me, who want their own space here and prefer self-hosting, I suggest considering snac2. I'm having a great experience with it, and it's easy to install and configure.