The number of instances based on #snac2 has been on the rise in recent days.
When looking at the statistics, it appears that the (still in testing) instance of BSD Cafe is currently the most populous.
Can I proudly say we're the largest #Fediverse (snac) instance? 😉
Tonight, the snac.bsd.cafe instance will run from here. The Raspberry PI 4's internal SD is in read only, while the disk is ZFS, with #BastilleBSD managing the snac jail.
Tonight, I will leave this instance (snac.bsd.cafe) running on the Raspberry PI 4 in my office cabinet, in order to monitor its performance. When connecting with #Tusky, the performance is excellent, while using the web interface, there is occasionally some slowdown - completely tolerable, considering that there is no JavaScript, etc., and that it is running on a Raspberry PI.
It seems that snac2 is especially efficient at introducing smaller instances. This is because it sends boosts, likes, and posts to all known instances, making it easier to increase the instance's federation level. This may increase the workload, but it also boosts post visibility.
This instance is now running on a Raspberry PI 4 powered by FreeBSD. Snac is working on a jail, on an external USB ssd disk (zfs).
It's just a bit slower than the beefy VM I've been using in the last two days - and that's great!
I wanted to try with NetBSD but at the moment it seems that NetBSD isn't detecting any USB device. I'll go deeper - otherwise I'll try to run from internal SD card, but I guess it will make the things quite slow.
It was working and performance was ok, but I had problems connecting to my user. Seems more a reverse proxy issue - I'll have to investigate. Now back to the VM, while I'm studying the situation.
Now that the threads are not locking anymore, I'm going to try to move this instance to a Raspberry Pi 4 on NetBSD 10.0 RC2.
Rsyncing the files - I'll switch as soon as the rsync will be over.
Stay tuned 🙂
HowTo install your own ActivityPub instance for the Fediverse based on snac2 on your #FreeBSD system. Snac2 is a simple, minimalistic ActivityPub instance written in portable C.
Next test will be with an Orange Pi PC or a Banana Pro - they're both much more powerful than the Raspberry PI Zero W and could be working, even if slowly
Far too slow. I had to immediately revert to the "old" jail. It wasn't crashing, but the cpu load was 100% and responding with http error 499. It's been a nice experiment, maybe I'll try with Alpine Linux or different, a bit better (armv7) hardware. I think it can be working.
Yesterday, I submitted a pull request to the snac2 developer, adding some installation notes for FreeBSD and an rc script to make it work. Just a few hours later, the change had already been merged into the official repository, along with other development commits. Snac is evolving and improving every day.
I've reduced the "max_timeline_entries" from 128 to 64 and the embedded web interface is now quite faster. There's the "More" button at the end of the page and the experience is much smoother.