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. It uses the __attribute__((__cleanup__)) GNU extension, that is supported at least by the gcc, clang and tcc C compilers. 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

On FreeBSD, to install curl just type:

pkg install curl

On NetBSD, to install curl just type:

pkgin install curl

The source code is available here.

Run make and then make install as root.

If you're compiling on NetBSD, you should use the specific provided Makefile and run make -f Makefile.NetBSD and then make -f Makefile.NetBSD 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

If your compilation process complains about undefined references to shm_open() and shm_unlink() (it happens, for example, on Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS), run it as:

make LDFLAGS=-lrt

If it still gives compilation errors (because your system does not implement the shared memory functions), you can fix it with

make CFLAGS=-DWITHOUT_SHM

From version 2.68, Linux Landlock sandboxing is included (not supported on Linux kernels older than 5.13.0). It's still a bit experimental, so you must compile it in explicitly with

make CFLAGS=-DWITH_LINUX_SANDBOX

From version 2.73, the language of the web UI can be configured; the po/ source subdirectory includes a set of translation files, one per language. After initializing your instance, copy whatever language file you want to use to the lang/ subdirectory of the base directory.

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)

Links of Interest

• Online snac manuals (user, administrator and data formats).
• How to run your own ActivityPub server on OpenBSD via snac (by Jordan Reger).
• How to install & run your own ActivityPub server on FreeBSD using snac, nginx, lets'encrypt (by gyptazy).
• How to install snac on OpenBSD without relayd (by @antics@mastodon.nu).
• Setting up Snac in OpenBSD (by Yonle).
• How to run your own social network with snac (by Giacomo Tesio). Includes information on how to run snac as a CGI.
• Improving snac Performance with Nginx Proxy Cache (by Stefano Marinelli).
• Caching Snac Proxied Media With Nginx (by Stefano Marinelli).
• My snac config (activitypub instance) with Caddy (by ffuentes).
• A bit of lore about Susie, snac's default avatar.

Incredibly awesome CSS themes for snac

• A compilation of themes for snac (by Ворон).
• A cool, elegant theme (by Haijo7).
• A terminal-like theme (by Tetra).

License

See the LICENSE file for details.

Author

grunfink @grunfink@comam.es with the help of others.

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