Federated, ActivityPub-compatible social network with friends, walls, and groups.

If you have any questions or feedback, there's a Telegram chat you can join.

Building/installation

Running directly on your server

Recommended: use the installation script

1. Install JRE or JDK 21 or newer from your distribution's package manager, here, here or here
2. Install MySQL. Note: on Debian, apt-get install mysql-server would instead install MariaDB, which is known to be incompatible with Smithereen.
3. Download a prebuilt bundle for your CPU architecture from the latest release to your server and unpack it somewhere
4. Run ./install.sh
5. Answer a few questions to configure Smithereen and create the first account. If you're using S3 storage for files, see the section about that below to better understand what the script asks you and configure your storage provider correctly.
6. Configure your web server to proxy the requests to Smithereen and imgproxy and serve user-uploaded files. See example configs for nginx and Caddy.
7. Log into your admin account from your web browser, then configure the rest of the server settings from its UI

Install manually from sources

1. Install JDK 21 or newer from your distribution's package manager, here, here or here
2. Install MySQL. Note: on Debian, apt-get install mysql-server would instead install MariaDB, which is known to be incompatible with Smithereen.
3. Build the jar by running mvn package -DskipTests=true, place it at /opt/smithereen/smithereen.jar and also copy the dependencies from target/lib. You should end up with this file structure:

   /opt/smithereen
   ├╴ smithereen.jar
   └╴ lib
      ├╴ activation-1.1.jar
      └╴ ...other dependencies
   

4. Set up the image processing native library (libvips): run java LibVipsDownloader.java to automatically download a prebuilt one from here. If you already have libvips installed on your system, you may skip this step, but be aware that not all libvips builds include all the features Smithereen needs.
5. Install and configure imgproxy
6. Fill in the config file, see a commented example here
   • You can use either the local file system (default) or an S3-compatible object storage service for user-uploaded media files.
7. Create a new MySQL database and initialize it with the schema using a command (mysql -p smithereen < schema.sql) or any GUI like phpMyAdmin
8. Configure and start the daemon: assuming your distribution uses systemd, copy the service file to /etc/systemd/system, then run systemctl daemon-reload and service smithereen start
9. Run java -jar /opt/smithereen/smithereen.jar /etc/smithereen/config.properties init_admin to create the first account
10. Configure your web server to proxy the requests to Smithereen and imgproxy and serve user-uploaded files. See example configs for nginx and Caddy.
11. Log into that account from your web browser, then configure the rest of the server settings from its UI

Using Docker

Copy Docker-specific config example to the project root directory as config.properties and edit it to set your domain. Also edit docker-compose.yml to add your imgproxy secrets. You can then use docker-compose to run Smithereen, MySQL, and imgproxy. You still need to configure your web server: nginx, Caddy. Create the first account by running docker-compose exec web bash -c ./smithereen-init-admin.

Using S3 object storage

Smithereen supports S3-compatible object storage for user-uploaded media files (but not media file cache for files downloaded from other servers).

To enable S3 storage, set upload.backend=s3 in your config.properties. Configure other properties depending on your cloud provider:

• upload.s3.region: the region to use, us-east-1 by default. Required for AWS, but some other cloud providers accept arbitrary values here.
• upload.s3.endpoint: the S3 endpoint, s3.<region>.amazonaws.com by default. Required if not using AWS.
• upload.s3.key_id and upload.s3.secret_key: your credentials for request authentication.
• upload.s3.bucket: the name of your bucket.
• upload.s3.override_path_style: if upload.s3.endpoint is set, set this to true if your cloud provider requires putting the bucket name into the hostname instead of in the path for API requests, like <bucket>.<endpoint>.
• upload.s3.protocol: https by default, can be set to http.

The following properties control the public URLs for clients to read the files from your S3 bucket. These are used for imgproxy and given out to clients directly when they click "Open original" in the image viewer, and will be used for non-image (e.g. video) attachments in a future Smithereen version:

• upload.s3.hostname: defaults to s3-<region>.amazonaws.com. Needs to be set if not using AWS and upload.s3.alias_host is not set.
• upload.s3.alias_host: can be used instead of upload.s3.hostname if you don't want your bucket name to be visible. Requires that you have a CDN or a reverse proxy in front of the storage provider.
  • If this is set, the bucket name is not included in the generated URLs. The URLs will have the form of <protocol>://<alias_host>/<object>.
  • If this is not set, the generated URLs will be of the form <protocol>://<hostname>/<bucket>/<object>.

You will need to configure your bucket to allow anonymous read access to objects, but not allow directory listing. Refer to Mastodon documentation on how to do this on different cloud providers.

You will also need to configure imgproxy to allow it to access your S3 storage:

IMGPROXY_ALLOWED_SOURCES=local://,https://<your S3 hostname or alias host>/

Make sure to include a trailing slash in the URL.

Contributing

If you would like to help translate Smithereen into your language, please do so on Crowdin. If your language isn't listed there, please ask to have it added.

If you would like to add a feature, please ask first before starting to work on it! This project is mostly "open-source but not open-contribution" because I (@grishka) have a rather specific vision of what it should be — an old-school social network that one primarily uses to stay up to date on the lives of people they know IRL and get to know these people better. An important part of that vision is to limit people's exposure to out-of-network content (created by those they don't have any connections with) as much as possible. The intended way to explore the network is by going along the social graph or (coming in the future) search for people. In particular, the following features will definitely not be added:

• Hashtags. The whole idea behind them is to be able to easily see what people you don't know post about some topics or global events. They thus serve as an easy gateway to out-of-network content. They encourage the creation of content that is more appealing to the global audience rather than one's followers. Account-scoped hashtags (#tag@username) may be added in the future though.
• Public feeds (local and federated). For the same reason, but also so that Smithereen servers don't become communities. They should just be the infrastructure that the network runs on.
• Global full-text post search. Same as hashtags.
• Public pages and posting on behalf of a group or an event. Logo accounts are bad. Logos shouldn't say things. Their existence erodes the humanness of the whole experience because you get these "higher beings" that aren't human and don't feel human. The intentional lack of easily obtainable logo accounts (no one is stopping one from creating a fake user profile for an organization, of course) serves to encourage authentic human interactions.
• Custom emojis. Many fediverse servers have these, but very few people use them in practice. And when they do, it almost always looks too colorful and distracting. Especially when they're animated.
• Non-quote reposts, like on Mastodon. Smithereen fully supports displaying these in order to be compatible with the majority of fediverse software, but the inability to create them is intentional. Separate comment threads for each repost reduce user confusion, invite more meaningful conversations and simplify the synchronization of these comments between servers. Combined with Smithereen's privacy settings and the ability of the post author to delete any comments on their posts, this completely eliminates all the abuse potential that, for example, quote tweets on Twitter present.
• Animated profile pictures as well as those with alpha transparency. Many fediverse servers allow these, but again, Smithereen is explicitly for authentic human interactions. So, it is built with the expectation that people will use their own photo, taken with a camera, as their profile picture, just like on Facebook or VKontakte.

If you disagree, feel free to fork this project, but please change the name if you do.

Federating with Smithereen

Smithereen supports various features not found in most other ActivityPub server software. See the federation document if you would like to implement these ActivityPub extensions in your project.