snac

A simple, minimalistic ActivityPub instance

Features

Lightweight, minimal dependencies
Extensive support of ActivityPub operations, e.g. write public notes, follow users, be followed, reply to the notes of others, admire wonderful content (like or boost), write private messages...
Multiuser
Mastodon API support, so Mastodon-compatible apps can be used
Simple but effective web interface
Easily-accessed MUTE button to silence morons
Tested interoperability with related software
No database needed
Totally JavaScript-free
No cookies either
Not much bullshit

About

This program runs as a daemon (proxied by a TLS-enabled real httpd server) and provides the basic services for a Fediverse / ActivityPub instance (sharing messages and stuff from/to other systems like Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, etc.).

This is not the manual; man pages snac(1) (user manual), snac(5) (formats) and snac(8) (administrator manual) are what you are looking for.

snac stands for Social Networks Are Crap.

Building and installation

This program is written in highly portable C. The only external dependencies are openssl and curl.

On Debian/Ubuntu, you can satisfy these requirements by running

apt install libssl-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev

On OpenBSD you just need to install curl:

pkg_add curl

The source code is available here.

Run make and then make install as root.

From version 2.27, snac includes support for the Mastodon API; if you are not interested on it, you can compile it out by running

make CFLAGS=-DNO_MASTODON_API

See the administrator manual on how to proceed from here.

Testing via Docker

A docker-compose file is provided for development and testing. To start snac with an nginx HTTPS frontend, run:

docker-compose build && docker-compose up

This will:

Start snac, storing data in data/
Configure snac to listen on port 8001 with a server name of localhost (see examples/docker-entrypoint.sh)
Create a new user testuser and print the user's generated password on the console (see examples/docker-entrypoint.sh)
Start nginx to handle HTTPS, using the certificate pair from nginx-alpine-ssl/nginx-selfsigned.* (see examples/nginx-alpine-ssl/entrypoint.sh)