Ask HN: Which ActivityPub software to use for a personal server?

For personal use, I would recommend Ted Unangst's honk.

https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk

But that is mainly because I value straightforward installation and simple administration. So that converges well with honk. If you(or your users) value features more you will probably want to use something else. but you will suffer when it comes time to administer the thing.

A bit too minimal for my use case really.

I'd go with pleroma then.

A thing to understand is this discover ability problem applies to all software on the network. You can subscribe to relays on your server when it's running to enable yourself to discover more content, and then the more you interact with people from across the network the more your server will become discoverable.

I do love honk but the code is horrible to read (probably not an issue for most) which makes it a pain when it can't, e.g., follow someone on a gotosocial instance and you want to debug that or you want something like 2FA.

Admittedly I don't use social media like most people, but I dont understand the "discovery problem", personally. I've never wondered "how do I discover user email addresses?" for example. Don't you already have friends or folks you're interested in following? Can't you ask them what their ActivityPub instance/identity is? Once you have even a small network, can't you see the folks who interact with those you're already following?

I don't mean for this to sound callous or dismissive, I'm just wondering if y'all can help me understand where you're coming from. Is it FOMO? An issue of optimization? I feel like time and attention is already limited and the last thing I need is to find more things on which to waste either.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, perhaps consider a more organic approach? Even on HN we see threads like "what are your favorite youtube channels?" from time to time, despite that one major draw to YouTube is the "discoverability" (it's one reason why folks post content there instead of on their own site, no?)

I personally never used Twitter for friends or any relatives.

And the discoverability problem is more for my account, rather than discovering other people,

Its very hard to grow organically on Mastodon.

Still, this applies to discovering other people too.

Fair enough, I can understand if you are trying to build an audience and be discovered yourself that this is a bigger problem than trying to discover others.

I feel like that's part of the point of the Fediverse, though - it;s not a centralized social media platform like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. - it;s really for creating interconnected communities that are mostly self-supporting and grow very deliberately.

The benefits of discoverability - gaining a following of strangers, reaching new audiences for marketing purposes, etc. - are also what breed a lot of the problems associated with centralized social media. If Twitter is an international airport, then Fediverse apps are like your local regional airports - like the ones you pass on the freeway but never really notice are there. If you;re looking for a true Twitter replacement, Mastodon and the others aren't it - they're building smaller, focused, organic communities rather than incentivizing engagement to sell eyeballs to advertisers. That changes their whole dynamic.

But these Discovery problems aren't because of the Fediverse. They are Mastodon Problems. Matrix is a federated protocol, and it doesn't have the same discovery issues.

I think it’s worth to check out https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial It’s far from „done“ and has a lot of rough edges, but it’s easy to setup and probably good enough for a single instance!

Looks interesting. Though it doesn't seem to deviate from Mastodon other than being a Back-end focused rewrite.

> Though it doesn't seem to deviate from Mastodon

It's a single binary that can use SQLite - from what I've heard of the Mastodon source, that's like a trowel compared to their intergalactic planet crusher that occasionally crushes parts of itself. Pleroma would be more of one of those big circular strip miners - a reasonably heavy faff and a half (don't let your OS upgrade Elixir! Pleroma might not restart!).

In a similar vein, I grew up in the era of Carmack .plan files and have always wanted to set something up for myself. There is a webfinger protocol but it suffers from the discovery problem (how do I even consider looking for one on a random host?!)

Is ActivityPub appropriate? It seems like it, especially with the “honk” system discussed here, but I’m curious if anyone else has tried this or if there’s better alternatives? I’ve also considered… that modern version of Gopher, but it has an accessibility problem for all but super dorks (which, honestly, probably isn’t too big of an issue for the kinds of people who would be interested in what I’m working on)

Use Pleroma. It's much easier to setup and better architectured technically. Also all(?) ActivityPub servers support the old Twitter API, so some third party Twitter apps have support for it - Twidere on Android definitely does, at least.

Is it easier to discover people on Pleroma ? Does it fix the issues I mentioned?

Discoverability is a little better since Pleroma exposes the public timelines for non-logged in users (though the admin can disable that). I'm not sure about search.

This is also possible on Mastodon now.

But I meant maybe there is a way to follow a whole instance like Misskey, or it shows users when it became aware of them rather than only when following them, etc.

Yes, Akkoma.dev allows you to create a “bubble timeline”, which is essentially your local timeline + the local timelines of any other servers you (the admin) chooses.

Be careful with Pleroma for anything business related. It's licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License. Anything attached to it is at risk of being tainted and requiring the same license.

https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma/-/blob/develop/AG...

I'm sure it's just fine for personal use though.

If you are embedding or extending the software than yes, the AGPL would take effect when providing a network service. But if you just use it and comunicate with it via the defined protocols there is no such obligation.

Great discussion, would love to see more information about the topic. It's definitely a good time for these three activitypub federated platforms to start getting more users.

I hope someone more knowledgeable replies. currently its looking to be either Pleroma or Mastodon.

Because Pleroma supports Mastodons API, so the app support is much better.

But I couldn't find any info about how Pleroma deals with user discovery

Honk, obviously.

It sounds like you should use twitter.

Looks like it