Federated microblog example using Fedify

[!WARNING] This program is for educational purposes only. Do not use it for any other purpose, since it has not been tested for security.

This is a simple federated microblog example using Fedify. The features of this program are:

• A user can create an account (up to one account)
• A user can be followed by other actors in the fediverse
• A follower can unfollow a user
• A user can see the list of their followers
• A user can post a message
• Posts made by a user are visible to their followers in the fediverse
• A user can follow other actors in the fediverse
• A user can see the list of actors they are following
• A user can see the list of posts made by actors they are following

Since it is a simple example for educational purposes, it has a lot of limitations:

• A user cannot configure their profile (bio, picture, etc.)
• A user cannot delete their account
• A user cannot edit/delete their posts
• A user cannot unfollow an actor they once followed
• No likes, shares (reposts), or replies
• No search feature
• No security features (authentication, authorization, etc.)

Dependencies

This program is written in TypeScript and uses Node.js. You need to have Node.js 20.0.0 or later installed on your system to run this program.

It also depends on few external libraries besides Fedify:

• Hono for web framework
• SQLite for database
• A few other libraries; see package.json for details

How to run

To run this program, you need to install the dependencies first. You can do that by running the following command:

npm install --include=dev

After installing the dependencies, you need to create the database schema. You can do that by running the following command:

npm run createdb

[!NOTE] The above command requires the sqlite3 program to be installed on your system. If it is not installed, you can install it using your package manager. For example, on Debian-based systems, you can install it using the following command:

sudo apt install sqlite3

On macOS, you probably already have it installed.

On Windows, you can download sqlite-tools-win-x64-*.zip from the SQLite website's download page and extract it to a directory in your PATH.

After creating the database schema, you can run the program using the following command:

npm run prod

This will start the program on port 8000. You can access the program by visiting http://localhost:8000/ in your web browser. However, since this program is an ActivityPub server, you probably need to expose it to the public internet to communicate with other servers in the fediverse. In that case, you can use tunneling services.

License

This program is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.