Today, I'll be conducting more experiments with snac2. Until yesterday, I had been running it with 16 threads.
Today, I'll try with 32 to observe the load and how it responds when posting while simultaneously using the web interface. With 16 threads, there was a (slight) slowdown during queue processing; let's see if things change with 32.
I'll also delve into some more niche aspects - I've noticed a couple of details regarding boosts that don't always seem to be displayed by Mastodon (a behavior I've also encountered on Pixelfed).
I'll investigate.
The first day of using #snac2 is coming to an end. Here are my observations:
It benefits greatly from ZFS and its compression. Performance is much better compared to an equivalent VM with OpenBSD.
Enafore and Phanpy work well. I appreciate Enafore's ability to hide replies and boosts (which Mastodon allows natively and also reflects in the API results). As for Phanpy, I like its interface. Of course, not everything works since the Mastodon API is only partially implemented, but the essentials are there. I especially like its integrated interface for threaded replies and notification display.
The "everything is a file" approach is very interesting. Even queues are treated as files, making it easy to monitor what's happening.
There are no character limits, and Markdown is natively supported - which is rendered correctly by Mastodon as well.
I believe that with larger numbers, Mastodon can show significantly better performance, mainly due to the separation of queue management and the web interface, as well as caching with Redis. I'm not sure how it would behave with 100 users connected simultaneously, reading everything from files and directories (perhaps better than I imagine), but this project isn't designed for large numbers. It doesn't aim to compete with Mastodon but to demonstrate that, without dependencies and high hardware requirements, one can successfully manage a node in the Fediverse.
In short, a decidedly positive experience that I will continue to delve into in the coming days.
Congratulations for the very good result, @grunfink !
Being part of the fediverse is great, but running mastodon for a single user instance is not the best fit in terms of maintenance and required resources.
So I'm happy to share that I succesfully deployed both gotosocial and snac2 on openbsd. Both are tiny, lighweight ActivityPub servers that I wll try out the coming weeks/months.
@ajroach42
I quite like the idea of #snac2, but would I use it for serious work? Not sure it's there yet. #Akkoma is a temptation for small instances, but I know the memory problems my last instance admin had with Pleroma (although Mastodon may have similar issues?). Probably #Hometown for a reasonable sized community though?
I’ve been running my own Mastodon instance for over a year now and it’s been a fun hobby, but I think I’m going to migrate to another (larger) instance and bring mine down. It’s been fun though!
Though I have been thinking about setting up some other #ActivityPub server. Not sure what yet… #Takahe looks pretty cool and there’s this tiny project I found called #snac2 that looks really interesting. #Mastodon is just so massive and it requires resources I don’t feel like allocating anymore.
My bio is ready too, but selfhost activitypub with #snac2 , but would be cool if it works as well. Well see soon :)
I think its really nice to add features like this, especially for alternatives to x.
@stigatle, hi there! So, is this going to last longer than Yarn? 😊 Kidding, kidding! I encourage you to write the process you followed to get snac running. I would be interested to read about it.
Hi! I have honestly not used yarn since I set this up here.. And barely go to 'x' as well, so I'm very happy with activitypub and #Snac2 ! :)
I followed the guide to compile and install - https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2
And then just added a subdomain to my nginx that points to it.
There is some info about nginx setup at the end of this url: https://comam.es/snac-doc/snac.8.html
If the source code version control history is to be trusted, I started developing snac (a simple, minimalistic #ActivityPub instance server written in C) exactly one year ago (Sept 19th).
It was not my first experience with ActivityPub: I had built a prototype version in Python some months before (hence the "2" in the snac2 repository name), and back in 2019 I made some partial implementation for an unrelated (and now forgotten) blog project, so the protocol was not totally new to me.
These are my thoughts about one year of development.
Why did I start it? Because I read somewhere about the (still baffling to me) humoungous requirements of a basic #Mastodon installation. I read a lot of people affirming that was the bare minimum: "it CAN'T be done with less resources". But I've always seen it as a glorified short message application and challenged myself to write a feature-complete #Fediverse instance with the following goals: keeping it small, simple, easily deployed, and lacking the bloat software tendencies of modern times.
Did it come out as expected? not totally sure, but probably yes. I even implemented more things that I originally planned (I initially said a big NO to myself regarding adding Mastodon API support, but finally did it and it works mostly well). The program is still somewhat small (a stripped binary of less that 300k probably counts). The no-database, no-cookies, no-javascript absolute rules still apply. I'm fine with the (opinionated) web UI that shows conversations as threaded trees instead of the plain, dull stream of posts that Mastodon or Twitter show. It cooperates pretty well with the always growing ecosystem of ActivityPub applications.
Was the time and effort worth it? On this, I'm not sure. I'm old and depressed and unemployed, so developing snac has kept my brain busy and entertained for a little while. But it has been more work that I expected: the ActivityPub specification is a bit diffuse in some areas, so every implementation does some things a bit different and many corner cases had to be implemented; some parts (specifically, the Mastodon API) have been very tedious to implement and test; and also, helping users debugging remote systems is difficult and very stressing for me. Fortunately, some fellow developers have helped me and I'm immensely thankful to them.
Has it been a success? I'm pretty sure about this: no. I thought that the small footprint, the lack of moving parts and the feature set would be attractive to a large base of users, but this has not been the case. Perhaps I've been unable to reach the neccessary potential users for it to reach some critical mass (a failure of the PR department 😆). Perhaps what I consider interesting features (minimalism, footprint, the web UI concept, Mastodon API compatibility, etc.) are not that valuable for most. Perhaps people disregard it just because it's not Mastodon. Perhaps there are errors and crashes that I'm not aware of. Perhaps snac is rubbish and I'm unable to see it. The reality is that snac is a niche and unknown part of the Fediverse ecosystem and there is no sign that the user base will grow from the current small fistful of deployments out there.
What about the future? I'm also not sure. Apart from some pending bugfixes and wishlist items mentioned in the TODO file, I've implemented all the features I initially expected and then many more, so I consider snac a finished program. New bugs will happen, that's for sure. New ActivityPub applications will show out there and, if experience tells me anything, they will all have slightly different protocol interpretations that will need some code tuning on my part. Development will continue; snac is a maintained program. But big changes will probably not happen anymore.
I appreciate snac2 a lot as well, I think it's a solid piece of software, that does exactly what it was supposed to.
I looked around for several solutions when I wanted to be on activitypub, and I was really happy when I found #snac2 and saw how easy it was to set up. I also appreciate that there is no javascript or complex web stuff on top of it, it's straight to the point.
Weekend is here, nothing special planned. First week after vacation is now done, went better then expected, kids started school this week as well (yesterday).
The weather is going to suck bigtime tomorrow, so It'll probably be a super lazy weekend. I hope to do some coding, I want to port one of my desktop clients to support activitypub through #snac2 , that would be really nice! I'll most likely dig into that a bit this weekend.
Been running #snac2 for some weeks now, runs very stable, also I like the way it works, I've been carefully added the users I've found mastodon\activitypub users on twitter, then adding them to here, slowly growing my list of people to follow.
I also visit certain instances that I know people are on that post about the stuff I like, I then check the instance local timeline and add people from there.
Hey guys, I am sitting on the #PeerTube (#Federated#YouTube) domain peertube.science - I want to gauge how much of an interest in this for me to set up. Is there anyone interested in a non commercial video service like this for the sciences? Humanities are welcome too. :)
@doot when I looked into setting up a Mastodon single user instance the instruction described how to do it on Ubuntu or Debian.
So can anyone tell me why don't they get the relevant packages into the Debian/Ubuntu packaging systems so as well as simplifying installation running daily unattended updates would push any security fixes automatically?
Mastodon in Debian "seems stuck in Ruby #DependencyHell ..., and is likely to prove difficult to maintain in the long term unless upstream calms down a bit" per @Anarcat [1]
It's a bit irritating what my Feed is "global" (or some other kind) by default
I see not only people I follow but also posts which was commented by the people I follow
Realized that my tinkering with #GoToSocial, #Takahe, #CalcKey and #Snac2, continuing to use #Pixelfed, #Lemmy and #Bookwyrm, and looking for compatibility problems are part of the same impulse that had me trying out every web browser I could find in the early 2000s and deliberately using Firefox and Opera on Linux as my daily drivers instead of IE on Windows.
It's a drop in the ocean, but it's my push for interoperability over #monoculture.