I’m building a new activitypub/threadiverse software focused on the needs of self hosters who want a single user instance.
I’ve been posting with it semi-regularly for the last month, and I think it’s ready for an open demo.
One of my objectives is to have the lightest resource usage for memory and CPU constrained hardware, as well as the fastest loading web interface for older phones and limited data plans. I ran out of data on my phone last week and having a 41kb front page came in very handy.
You can try the web UI at https://scrapetacular.ydns.eu/latest You can also POST AS A GUEST TO THE FEDIVERSE without signing up. I’m not sure you can do this anywhere else, I’m manually approving posts on the backend because … well you know. If it asks for a user and pass, use guest and guest, your post will appear with a username like guest4269.
Ideally, open this post https://scrapetacular.ydns.eu/post/10127 and reply to it.
My other plan for mobile is to target the Sync for Lemmy app, as it’s dead, meaning it’s no longer a moving target.
I’ve made a few technical choices aimed at keeping things fast
These include:
No ORMs
- They are convenient but make performance tuning difficult when things get complex as you don’t write the queries directly
No Javascript
- I may have to go back on this if I keep the guest posting function, it might need a captcha or anubis.
No nested comments in the web UI
- Nested comments are super slow, you are essentially querying the database for the OP, then querying for the N immediate children, then doing N queries for all of their children, then keep going recursively until you reach your depth limit, or all comments are found, you then need to render this structure with html/css
No front page images
- This is more of a personal preference that happened to make things load faster, the front page displays the text of the OP and last few comments IN FULL, giving a good preview of the conversation, and allocating more space to people who write rather than post memes. Inline images in posts are also replaced with links.
No upvotes/downvotes
- DID YOU KNOW that most threadiverse traffic is upvotes, downvotes adn emojis? You get an instant speedup by simply not processing them. Also, since this is a single user instance, all my comments are by definition awesome
ROADMAP
- Massive refactor
- Make the project public
- unit tests (this is basically my only requirement for v1)
- sync for lemmy API
- admin UI
- “AI” to “My Butt” wordfilter (mandatory and hardcoded)
- default subscription to /c/fuck_AI
- Solve channel discoverablity once and for all
- SUPERBLOCK (i.e. block everyone who liked this comment)
- dockerfile? I don’t use docker tbh
- Read Mastodon posts? Do they even have good content?
Tech Stack
- Go
- SQLite
I’m using the pure Go sqlite library, Bluemonday for html sanitisation, Blackfriday for Markdown and Migrate for auto db migrations.
End
Thanks to Snoopy and the Cool Froges at jlai.lu for allowing me to test on their channel.
Is this project of interest to you? Have I missed anything obvious? Is there anything else you would like to know?
I think projects like these will eventually cause activity pub to evolve into something that handles scaling better.
Hopefully. Or it might actually evolve into something worse
THIS IS THE FUTURE FURRIES WANT https://evilmaid.net/blog/trusting-trust-fediverse/interactionPolicy-flow.png
You can also POST AS A GUEST TO THE FEDIVERSE without signing up.
Oh, dear lord. As if we don’t have enough spam and drive-by trolls as it is.
🚨🚨🚨 WE HAVE OUR FIRST GUEST SHITPOSTER 🚨🚨🚨 WE HAVE OUR FIRST GUEST SHITPOSTER
I like interactive demos, especially ones that worry people :) But I don’t want my instance to get banned so I have to manually approve messages.
Also, to reply to this thread as a guest use this link https://scrapetacular.ydns.eu/post/10170
This is exactly the kind of insanity we need around here. I think some of these choices are bonkers and that’s great.
I’m glad someone gets The Vision, I don’t want to just build Lemmy but in a better language :D
There’s more where that came from
You may notice that some threads have a word count for certain words, I’m working on a feature that I’m calling the Godwin Factor, you pass in a list of words to look for that will tell you if the thread is already a dumpsterfire before you go in.
Say you’re on /c/baking and you see an innocuous thread about apple pie, then you see that it has 274 comments, and 8 people have been called nazis, just look at the picture and move on with your day.
Is it vibes coded?Nevermind!Wow, bold decisions for what it’ll support and not. I like that it’s laser focused on a specific use case. What do you think about the impact to instances’ federation queue when a bunch of single user instances follow a community? 10x the traffic and queue for 10 single user instances than one instance with 10 users.
I ask this as someone that ran a full single user lemmy instance right up until recently and switch to a public piefed due to the traffic multiplication and other concerns.
I don’t know if it will scale tbh, but also I don’t expect many people to actually self host, and I’m sort of hoping the fediverse stays a bit … ghettoized. The current threadiverse is like 50000 people and works fine, I’m hoping there will just be more loose communities of 50000 that don’t really federate with the main one.
Let us both hope for those kind of scaling problems due to popularity 🤞
Is the source code already available?
No not yet, probably this weekend, this is just a demo post to see if my VPS catches fire or something. I haven’t picked a licence yet either
For anyone that’s interested in something like that, sounds exactly like Snac2 - works very nicely
Yes, I like snac, it’s the first codebase where everything clicked for me. It’s also a bit like a Gotosocial for the threadiverse instead of the twittercloneiverse, because the stack makes a lot of choices for you.
Oh yeah super interested in this
I briefly entertained doing a self hosted instance but that turned out to be a tall order for a newbie
Maybe, maybe not. I scoped it to the smallest useful thing I could build and get feedback, which turned out to be about 5k LOC, do you use Go at all?
Thoughts on increasing from single user to, say, ten? So that I could selfhost something and have my less technical friends/family on it?
I don’t even HAVE a user table :D
(I might do something screwy with oauth2 to allow authenticated guestposting)
