A lightweight, federated and powerful microblogging server written in Nim. Pothole allows you to share your digital life without the constraints of modern, commercial social media!
Note: Pothole is a work-in-progress. Lots of implementation details are being figured out just now and are thus likely to change over time. In other words, this is pre-alpha or even research stage.
Note: This is the main branch which contains a bleeding-edge codebase, which isn't stable at all for production environments, consider downloading the stable branch instead which is more stable. (Although, there is no stable branch as of yet since nothing works yet) So pick your poison! stability or bleeding-edge (or pick a specific feature branch to test out a feature if you are a developer.)
Pothole is a microblogging server written in Nim, it's designed to be simple & fast. It has unique features such as allowing user-profiles to be customized. Pothole is far more reminiscent of Tumblr in this sense since it allows you to customize your profile and unleash your creativity in ways that other microblogging services simply cannot do.
Pothole federates to other servers using the ActivityPub protocol which means you can communicate to users on Mastodon, Akkoma, Misskey or whatever website that implements ActivityPub. Pothole is also compatible with Mastodon's API interface, so your clients, frontends and bots should work with as few changes as possible.
No. You are better off using Pleroma for a stable backend or GoToSocial for a light-as-air backend.
Development is slow because creating anything remotely like this is incredibly difficult, I am trying to emphasize speed & safety over shiny features, and that means I keep planning ahead for new things and that's why this is taking so long. Pothole is still in a sort-of research state, I believe it will stabilize over the coming months but I can't guarantee anything.
Install nim, your favorite C compiler (gcc is recommended, clang might not be optimal) and nimble. Run nimble -d:release build and it will build with release settings. (You will also need to install postgres as a library and database server somewhere.)
Pothole's main database is postgres, and so it expects an actively-running postgres server process in the background to work. You can change the database connection settings by editing the pothole.conf configuration file. If you don't want to (or can't) install postgres but you have access to docker, then you can run the potholectl db docker command to generate a postgres database docker container configured for pothole. potholectl can be found in the build/ folder when you finish building pothole.
Assuming you did not change the port that pothole uses in the configuration file, head over to 127.0.0.1:3500 and experience its glory! This is a basic demonstration setup, a proper setup procedure with reverse proxying and media proxy can be found is coming soon!
Copyright © Leo Gavilieau xmoo@privacyrequired.com 2022-2023
Copyright © penguinite penguinite@tuta.io 2024
Licensed under GNU Affero General Public License version 3 or later. A copy is is available as the LICENSE file.