trying ActivityPub on FreedomBox via snac
I think…
Massive social networks are a dimension of use that FreedomBox has yet to satisfy. The most established free protocol seems to be ActivityPub. This allows a FreedomBox to integrate with the Fediverse.
The only package available in Debian repositories that makes it possible to host an instance is snac (recently stable). The snac team has made a basic implementation that aims to mitigate the toxic excesses of this type of public network (which also involve greater resource consumption). Perfect for FreedomBox.
successful part of setup
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So I gave it a try. The installation (
sudo apt install snac) automates some configurations. But its documentation in manual pages offers generic examples. -
The configuration for the web server is in
/etc/apache2/conf-available/snac2.confand the database is in/var/lib/snac2. -
Since the documentation does not specify the typical Debian configuration, I did not follow its examples (in
man 8 snac). -
I used the default directory already created to create users in it:
sudo snac adduser /var/lib/snac2 newuser(which also creates its password). -
Debian sets up a debian-snac user to manage that directory, so I adjusted the ownership:
sudo chown -R debian-snac:debian-snac /var/lib/snac2/user/. -
In /var/lib/snac2/server.json, I changed the “host” value to “domain.fbx.one”. I replaced the contents of
/var/lib/snac2/style.cssby choosing a style from here. -
The default configuration of snac uses internal port 8001 and exposes the instance at https://domain.fbx.one/social/.
unsuccessful part of setup
The internal user of the instance is reachable from an external user of the Mastodon federation and they can follow each other.
However, publications, avatars, banners, followers, and followings of internal users on FreedomBox are not updated for external users. The only way to access the public content of snac users is by going directly to https://domain.fbx.one/social/user.
I don’t know where I went wrong or what I failed to configure.
I expect…
If you have tried something similar, I would like to know how you solved the installation of snac or any other ActivityPub app on FreedomBox.
