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Friendica

Snac

Compared to Friendica, its featureset is basic at best. But compared to other Fediverse tools like #mastodon it does not fare so bad. But how usable is it as an alternative to my peronal Friendica use.

The good stuff

• Setup is really easy for anyone who has self-hosted any services before. The documentation in manpage format might be old school but it is very complete - read it. If you're on Debian you can even use the package from trixie-backports which is kept very current!

• It shows the timeline chronologically but with nested threads. This is the only way that makes sense to me and is exactly what I use in Friendica (where different settings are available). This means every new activity on a thread brings it up again (partly collapsed) so you always see the necessary context to follow conversations. For me this is the most important feature, I would not even have continued testing without it. Snac just does it right!

• It has the looks! Well at least after applying some stylesheets. Calling the vanilla install basic would already be an overstatement. But have a look at the styles that are linked from snac's Reaedme. I chose the next.css style and have attached an image of how it looks below. The screenshot is from an Android phone and this works remarkably well, even on mobile (some caveats below)!

• It's compatible with Mastodon apps. I have only tested #Fedilab because I use it for other stuff too. Everything just works as expected. Although I have to admit, I like the native Web-UI (next.css) even more.

• Long Text with Markdown formatting. 500 character per Toot - No thank you, I am not chatting here!

What is missing (or is it?)

• There is only the timeline and you can follow Hashtags, that's it. No Channels, no groups, no theme-specific timelines. But honestly, I did not use any of that on Friendica, mainly for performance reasons. So this is a non-issue for me personally.

• Following RSS feeds. This feature I will really miss. In Friendica I could direclty follow Feeds and interact with them from my timeline exactly like with ActivityPub Notes or Articles. I will have to use an external translation service or write my own for that (having written an ActivityPub related tool with tootgroup.py before.)

• Message formatting is somewhat less flexible but this post shows what is possible still. Sometimes I like to put images in between paragraphs but not having that is also not a big deal.

• Event Calendar. This is not a feature I expect Snac to support but I do use it on Friendica and will have to think about how to replace it.

What could be improved

I have already stated how great the mobile experience is when using the next.css stylesheet. The only downside is that I have to login with username/password again and again, every time the mobile browser is sent to sleep by Android.

Optionally enabling the use of a login cookie would make life much easier. Even better would be enabling Snac to be installed as a Progressive Web App, but I have to admit, I'm not sure how hard or feasible this would be.

Overall, I do not see many shortcomings with Snac. Obviously it offers less features than Friendica, but what it does, it does very well and at least in my view, the important stuff is exactly where it needs to be.

Conclusion

Adding grunfink@comam.es because maybe you're interested. Please don't treat this as a feature-request or even critizism. It's mostly meant as info for people who have not tried snac yet.

Alt...

Screenshot of the Snac Web user interface running with the next.css style sheet

Think I'm about ready to setup #snac2 and migrate to a small personal instance. Right now I'm stuck trying to decide what subdomain would be most clever/funny to use along with my heavy.rocks domain. This is always the hardest part. I guess the straightforward answer is snac.heavy.rocks. But that doesn't feel fun enough.

"Release Notes:
Hide EmojiReacts from muted actors and blocked instances."
Well, yes! Thanks!

You don't know Snac? But you should: https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2

The Fediverse is much larger than a large Mastodon. Consider setting up your own small server, Snac is easy to install and enjoyable to use.
A simple, minimalistic and well documented #ActivityPub instance server written in C, no database needed, totally JavaScript-free, no cookies either, not much bullshit.

#snac2 #fediverse #frugalfediverse

#snac2 #fediverse #frugalfediverse

You can simply use relay instances to be interconnected with other instances to exchange posts and it works seamless with #Mastodon, #Pleroma, #snac / #snac2 and many other ones! If you're in tech, you might want to use:

https://fedi-relay.gyptazy.com

You can simply add it to get a bigger reach but also to get more interesting content into your own timeline which becomes even more important on single user- & smaller instances.

#activitypub #mastodon #fediverse #opensource #bsd #runbsd #freebsd #openbsd #netbsd #dragonflybsd #debian #proxmox #xcpng #talos #coding #programming #fediwall #relay #fedirelay #acitivitypubrelay #selfhost #homelab #community

Alt...

Activity Pub / Fediverse Relay