Technically, anyone with the knowledge and interest can spin up a single-user ActivityPub server and go about their business, but generally these servers aren’t being developed with that usage in mind. In other words, they can be overkill for individuals in terms of features or resource use.
That’s where single-user software comes into play. Explicitly developed for individuals, or in some cases very small groups, to use, this software is lighter on resources and more focused in its features for individuals.
As to why you might want this: it enables you to benefit from many of the benefits of ActivityPub, connecting and engaging with others & building your own curated feeds, without some of the drawbacks of multi-user servers such as keeping up with federation/defederation decisions that may affect what you can interact with & follow.
So on to a couple lists, in no particular order:
“Microblogging” but with relaxed character limits:
- GoToSocial
- Hollo
- Ktistec
- Seppo - Note: more specialized/limited compared to above.
- Takahe - More experimental compared to others above
Other
- GoBlog - Simple blogging
- Betula - Bookmark management & sharing.
- Postmarks - Same idea as Betula, but some differences like ActivityPub commenting possible.
I’m sure there’s way more, but these were a few that stuck out to me. Let me know any others you’re into that I may have overlooked!
Seppo is a really unfortunate name…
Going to guess it’s one of the UrbanDictionary definitions, or in that vein…
Here I was thinking Ktistec was the most unfortunate, mainly as it’s awkward to remember & write.
Australian/British slang. It’s a disparaging term for Americans
Starts with rhyming slang
American = Yank Yank = Tank Tank = Septic Tank Septic Tank = Seppo
Lol Seppo is really common Finnish male name especially among older people.
And here I thought I’d never see a lower form of wit than punning.
Rhyming slang isn’t really supposed to be funny, rather obfuscatory. It’s almost like a cipher, so that anyone not in the know doesn’t understand. That’s a theory, anyway.
Huh, learned something today, thanks for the explanation
BSD community seems to like snac2
There is also MicroBlogPub, although development has wound down in the past year. I spun up a test instance before that, though, and it does what it says on the tin.
I used microblog.pub for a good year or so, worked really nicely (although it did slow down once when Lemmy wasn’t honoring my unfollow requests and kept hitting it with Announce activities - ended up just editing the python code to block those domains). I *love* that there’s no infinite scrolling. Only reason I moved off it is because I ended up putting the functionality I needed into my personal art gallery app (which is what I’m posting this from now).
Takahe is IMO the opposite of “single user software” . It shines when you want to host multiple users with multiple different domains and identities.
It shines when you want to host multiple users with multiple different domains and identities.
Emphasis added. It’s that last part that drew me to include it. A single individual can prefer to portray themselves in multiple ways, particularly for different fediverse software (or even just different projects), so that’s why I included it.
a bit shameless self bump but im working on upub. not feature complete yet but im daily driving it and it aims to be small, complete and cheap to run
A single user Lemmy instance is pretty low overhead if you don’t mind the All feed being the same as your Subscriptions feed.
How does that work for discovery, though?
For people finding you, it means having to interact more in ways that encourage them to follow/subscribe to you, similar to how it goes now. For you finding stuff, it’s also similar in that you’d want to follow/subscribe to those that introduce you to others to follow/subscribe to. It’s really more for those that don’t mind putting forth effort to have their own online social space, much like the setup involved in having any online space.
