Socialhome v0.23.0 released

Work continues towards a full replacement of the UI layer! @[email protected] has been hard at work again, working on both the UI layer, but also the backend and the federation library. Massive kudos <3

This is the last release where it will be possible to use the old UI. The next release is expected to completely remove the old UI, which will be a much welcome clean-up of the code base.

When updating, please note the instructions for running Socialhome with the new UI. The old setting to enable the new UI is gone, instead you will need to route to it using your reverse proxy. In the next release this will become mandatory as the old UI will disappear from the Socialhome backend container.

While things are in flux, unfortunately there aren't very good example ways to run the Socialhome backend and the new frontend. We're hoping to improve on this with the next release, when the old UI will be fully removed. Please pop in our chat room if you have issues attempting to run Socialhome.

Please note due to build issues with the old UI, arm images are not available for this release. If you need them, please ask in the chat room and we will figure something out.

This is not all! The release of v0.23.0 also contains a bunch of other changes and fixes. See the full changelog. Additionally, the federation library has received a ton of changes and fixes which can be found here.

Installing and updating

We recommend using the Docker images.

Notes on how to use the Docker images can be found in the docs.

What is Socialhome?

Socialhome is best described as a federated personal profile with social networking functionality. Users can create rich content using Markdown. All content can be pinned to the user profile and all content will federate to contacts in the federated social web. Federation happens using the ActivityPub and Diaspora protocols.

Please check the official site for more information about features. Naturally, the official site is a Socialhome profile itself.

• Official site
• Documentation (for admins)
• Code repository (GitHub mirror)
• Chat room on Matrix

Try Socialhome?

If you want to try Socialhome first before trying to install it, register at https://socialhome.network and then ping us with a comment on the user name chosen to get the account approved. You can also request account approval in the chat room. This unfortunately approval step is due to spammers.

Contribute

Do you want to work on a Django and VueJS powered social network server? Join in the fun! We have easy to follow development environment setup documentation and a friendly chat room for questions.

#socialhome #federation #fediverse #activitypub #diaspora #django #vuejs

Socialhome v0.22.0 released, with a completely new UI!

This is a massive milestone for the #Socialhome project, one that could not have been possible without the hard work of @[email protected]. If you have followed the Socialhome project, you'll know that Alain has been responsible for most of the development of project in the recent years. This includes rewriting the #federation library to ensure #ActivityPub support is first class. More recently Alain has taken the challenge of rewriting the frontend, which has fallen into a rather poor state over the years.

The new UI work is actually a coordination of two people working many years apart. Way back years ago @[email protected] made some UI designs for a new Socialhome UI (thank you! <3). While the designs were not implemented for years, they were not forgotten. In 2023 Alain jumped to the challenge and started the full UI rewrite of the Socialhome frontend. This UI has now matured into a state that it is good for daily usage - which is the main focus of this release!

Currently, a Socialhome installation will still default to the old UI. If you do want to try out the new UI for example on socialhome.network, go to the account settings and toggle the "New UI" flag. Going back is also easy, should the new UI cause unforeseen issues (please do report!).

If you are a server admin, see the new UI installation instructions for how to add the new UI to your instance.

This is not all! The releases of v0.21.0 and v0.22.0 also contain a bunch of other changes and fixes. Most notably;

• ActivityPub profiles are now richer, including bio and a larger picture, in addition to an avatar.
• Many new API's to support the new UI, including session authentication, search, media upload, content fetching over uuid, profile organize and profile settings.
• Whoosh has been replaced with Xapian as a search index backend.

See the full changelogs. Additionally, the federation library has received a ton of changes and fixes which can be found here.

Also, last but not least, we moved from GitLab to Codeberg. Check out the new repositories.

Installing and updating

We recommend using the Docker images (amd64/arm64).

Notes on how to use the Docker images can be found in the docs.

What is Socialhome?

Socialhome is best described as a federated personal profile with social networking functionality. Users can create rich content using Markdown. All content can be pinned to the user profile and all content will federate to contacts in the federated social web. Federation happens using the ActivityPub and Diaspora protocols.

Please check the official site for more information about features. Naturally, the official site is a Socialhome profile itself.

• Official site
• Documentation (for admins)
• Code repository (GitHub mirror)
• Chat room on Matrix

Try Socialhome?

If you want to try Socialhome first before trying to install it, register at https://socialhome.network and then ping us with a comment on the user name chosen to get the account approved. You can also request account approval in the chat room. This unfortunately approval step is due to spammers.

Contribute

Do you want to work on a Django and VueJS powered social network server? Join in the fun! We have easy to follow development environment setup documentation and a friendly chat room for questions.

#socialhome #federation #fediverse #activitypub #diaspora #django #vuejs

Socialhome v0.20.0 released

This release contains some important performance fixes to some background jobs that had previously caused a lot of database load. Additionally, we queue less jobs that don't make sense.

Full changelog:

• Fix missing Http404 imports in Streams API viewsets.
• Fix send_reply_notifications job database query performance issues.
• Stop queuing unnecessary send_reply_notifications jobs for received content that has no local participations.

Installing and updating

We recommend using the Docker images:

• amd64: registry.gitlab.com/jaywink/socialhome:v0.20.0
• arm64: registry.gitlab.com/jaywink/socialhome:v0.20.0-arm64

Notes on how to use the Docker images can be found in the docs. They're a bit minimal, we're looking on getting better example Docker based install instructions in place soon.

What is Socialhome?

Socialhome is best described as a federated personal profile with social networking functionality. Users can create rich content using Markdown. All content can be pinned to the user profile and all content will federate to contacts in the federated social web. Federation happens using the ActivityPub and Diaspora protocols.

Please check the official site for more information about features. Naturally, the official site is a Socialhome profile itself.

• Official site
• Documentation (for admins)
• Code repository (GitHub mirror)
• Chat room on Matrix

Try Socialhome?

If you want to try Socialhome first before trying to install it, register at https://socialhome.network and then ping us with a comment on the user name chosen, and the account can be activated. You can also request account approval in the chat room. Unfortunately due to spammers accounts on the project instance need to be separately activated.

Contribute

Want to work on a Django and VueJS powered social network server? Join in the fun! We have easy to follow development environment setup documentation and a friendly chat room for questions.

#socialhome #federation #fediverse #activitypub #diaspora #django #vuejs

Socialhome v0.18.0 released

Alain ( @[email protected] ) has been hard at work during 2023, making Socialhome a better citizen in the Fediverse. The releases of Socialhome v0.18.0 and federation library v0.25.0 bring a ton of fixes and compatibility improvements when talking to other platforms on the network.

Additionally there are improvements to how Socialhome renders content, fetches missing profiles and work on reducing database load, among other items to mention.

For the full changelogs, see:

• Socialhome: https://socialhome.readthedocs.io/en/latest/changelog.html
• federation: https://gitlab.com/jaywink/federation/-/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

Installing and updating

We recommend using the Docker images:

• amd64: registry.gitlab.com/jaywink/socialhome:v0.18.0
• arm64: registry.gitlab.com/jaywink/socialhome:v0.18.0-arm64

Notes on how to use the Docker images can be found in the docs. They're a bit minimal, we're looking on getting better example Docker based install instructions in place soon.

What is Socialhome?

Socialhome is best described as a federated personal profile with social networking functionality. Users can create rich content using Markdown. All content can be pinned to the user profile and all content will federate to contacts in the federated social web. Federation happens using the ActivityPub and Diaspora protocols.

Please check the official site for more information about features. Naturally, the official site is a Socialhome profile itself.

• Official site
• Documentation (for admins)
• Code repository (GitHub mirror)
• Chat room on Matrix

Try Socialhome?

If you want to try Socialhome first before trying to install it, register at https://socialhome.network and then ping us with a comment on the user name chosen, and the account can be activated. Unfortunately due to spammers accounts on the project instance need to be separately activated.

Contribute

Want to work on a Django and VueJS powered social network server? Join in the fun! We have easy to follow development environment setup documentation and a friendly chat room for questions.

#socialhome #federation #fediverse #activitypub #diaspora #django #vuejs

Thanks again for #JetBrains on continuing to support #Socialhome with some IDE licenses 🤩 These products are awesome #developer tools, recommend highly. Socialhome would have been harder to build without the smart tools from the JetBrains folks.

#devtools #pycharm #python

Socialhome v0.17.0 released

Againt, thanks to @[email protected], this release features a ton of improvements to the ActivityPub federation layer of Socialhome, but also upgrading Django to 3.x, which is a major achievement in terms of keeping up to date with dependencies. In regards to upgrading Django we also decided to take a deep dive and ditch uWSGI in favour of Daphne and ASGI. This does mean admins running Socialhome need to change their reverse proxy configuration.

Highlights:

• Breaking change. No more uWSGI. Both http and websockets should now be routed to Daphne.
• Django 2 -> 3. A whole load of Python dependencies upgraded.
• Signups can now be set to be approved separately.
• Various improvements to ActivityPub federation.

Full changelog.

This release also pairs with a v0.24.0 release of the federation library. The changelog for that can be found here.

What is Socialhome?

Socialhome is best described as a federated personal profile with social networking functionality. Users can create rich content using Markdown. All content can be pinned to the user profile and all content will federate to contacts in the federated social web. Federation happens using the ActivityPub and Diaspora protocols (Matrix maybe coming up one day :))!

Please check the official site for more information about features. Naturally, the official site is a Socialhome profile itself.

• Official site
• Documentation (for admins)
• Code repository (GitHub mirror)
• Chat room on Matrix

Contribute

Want to work on a Django and VueJS powered social network server? Join in the fun! We have easy to follow development environment setup documentation and a friendly chat room for questions.

#socialhome #federation #fediverse #activitypub #diaspora #django #vuejs

Socialhome v0.16.0 released

After over a year, a Socialhome release is out again! The main thanks for this release goes out to @[email protected], who has pretty much re-written the whole ActivityPub federation layer for this release. Not a small job at all, and without any noticeable regressions too.

Initially, when the ActivityPub layer was added for Socialhome, it was a quick JSON only job, with federation only really ever tested with Mastodon. Now we have proper JSON-LD based inbound/outbound federation that not only adds a lot more supported platforms but also support for various new objects like video and audio.

Highlights:

• Fully rewritten ActivityPub protocol support using JSON-LD.
• Python minimum version supported changed to 3.8 with support up to 3.10.
• NodeJS required version bumped to v12.
• New background queue priorities to ensure federation traffic is always prioritised.
• Threaded replies!
• Support for video and audio attachments (ActivityPub only).
• Fetching of previous replies when new content is received.

And many more fixes and tweaks. Full changelog.

This release also pairs with a v0.23.0 release of the federation library. The changelog for that can be found here.

What is Socialhome?

Socialhome is best described as a federated personal profile with social networking functionality. Users can create rich content using Markdown. All content can be pinned to the user profile and all content will federate to contacts in the federated social web. Federation happens using the ActivityPub and Diaspora protocols (Matrix maybe coming up one day :))!

Please check the official site for more information about features. Naturally, the official site is a Socialhome profile itself.

• Official site
• Documentation (for admins)
• Code repository (GitHub mirror)
• Chat room on Matrix

FYI, currently signups are closed on the official instance due to spam users. We're working on changing this soon.

Contribute

Want to work on a Django and VueJS powered social network server? Join in the fun! We have easy to follow development environment setup documentation and a friendly chat room for questions.

#socialhome #federation #fediverse #activitypub #diaspora #django #vuejs

Get involved

We need your help to build a great platform for a rich social profile in the #federation! If you are familiar with #Django or #VueJS (or want to learn!) and are interested in getting involved, please don't hesitate to get in touch!

For guidelines how to contribute, please first read our contributing documentation.

Development

Our development environment is easy to set up. And if #Docker is your thing, we've got you covered too. Check out the documentation.

Thanks again for #JetBrains on continuing to support #Socialhome with an IDE license pack 🤩 These products are awesome #developer tools, recommend highly. Socialhome would have been harder to build without the smart tools from the JetBrains folks.

#devtools

Socialhome v0.13.0 released

Hello 👋 Yes, it's been a while! Eight months since the last release in fact. The project is still alive, but not as active as previously. Progress still happening once in a while, thus a new release!

Highlights

• Start adding Matrix support 🎉 Very, very early days, and totally experimental. Currently, if enabled and hooked up with a compatible Matrix server, local user accounts are mirrored to the Matrix side and additionally their public posts get mirrored in profile rooms and hashtag rooms. More later as things develop!
• Translations process! Socialhome can now be translated and is now fully translated to #French! Thanks to Alain St-Denis for the awesome work to both push through the translations process and also do the French translations <3 Other languages partially translated are German and Norwegian. Also thanks to Weblate for hosting the translations for us.
• More changes and fixes to ensure ActivityPub and Diaspora identities don't get duplicated, for remote platforms that have both versions (like Socialhome instances!).
• A bunch of bug fixes to the streams UI and to the federation library.

Full changelogs:

• Socialhome - https://socialhome.readthedocs.io/en/latest/changelog.html
• Federation - https://github.com/jaywink/federation/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

What is Socialhome?

Socialhome is best described as a #federated personal profile with social networking functionality. Users can create rich content using #Markdown. All content can be pinned to the user profile and all content will federate to contacts in the federated social web. Federation happens using the #ActivityPub and #Diaspora protocols, with #Matrix coming up!

Please check the official site for more information about features. Naturally, the official site is a #Socialhome profile itself.

• Official site
• Documentation (for admins)
• Code repository (GitHub mirror)
• Chat room

Contribute

Want to work on a #Django and VueJS powered social network server? Join in the fun! We have easy to follow development environment setup documentation and a friendly chat room for questions.

#socialhome #federation #changelog #news #socialnetwork #fediverse #selfhosting