Congrats Ted! Honk is a beautifully opinionated piece of work.
I don’t run it myself because it’s a bit too spartan for me but I really appreciate what it is and what it does. The world needs more alternative takes like this!
Mastodon itself is such a B-E-A-S-T to set up and run, this lightweight alternative is great!
Glad to see it’s still being developed. I have been meaning to set up my own ActivityPub server, and this seems a lot more suited to my goals than more heavyweight software like Mastodon or Pleroma.
Worth noting that Honk doesn’t have an masto-compatible API which means your only way of accessing it is via the web UI it ships with. If you’re after something light-ish with a (good enough) masto-compatible API, GotoSocial is probably your best bet.
Imagine if Mastodon were not six processes written in three programming languages, but were instead a single binary written in golang using SQLite for storage. That’s honk.
It works quite well for me; I have a cheapo DigitalOcean server and I never have to do any maintenance, or worry about defederation drama making it hard to follow interesting weirdos.
Although, GoToSocial only provides the backend, you have to bring your own UI.
Edit: it doesn’t match the description better. (Just realized what you said, sorry.)
I assume donio meant to say GTS may be better since it’s API is mastodon-compatible so you can just use any available UI, like https://semaphore.social/ or any of the mobile clients directly.
Well, mostly. Because it’s not 100% masto-compatible (IDs are strings, not ints; rate limit headers are epoch seconds, not ISO8601, etc.[1]) a whole bunch of stuff doesn’t work (Ivory, Mammoth, Mastodon.py without tweaks, etc.)
[1] Which are compliant to the API spec but it seems a whole bunch of clients have (stupidly) ignored the spec in favour of copying what Mastodon does.
Congrats Ted! Honk is a beautifully opinionated piece of work.
I don’t run it myself because it’s a bit too spartan for me but I really appreciate what it is and what it does. The world needs more alternative takes like this!
Mastodon itself is such a B-E-A-S-T to set up and run, this lightweight alternative is great!
Completely forgot about this! Was first discussed here in 2019: https://lobste.rs/s/ds5kkw/honk_preview
Glad to see it’s still being developed. I have been meaning to set up my own ActivityPub server, and this seems a lot more suited to my goals than more heavyweight software like Mastodon or Pleroma.
Worth noting that Honk doesn’t have an masto-compatible API which means your only way of accessing it is via the web UI it ships with. If you’re after something light-ish with a (good enough) masto-compatible API, GotoSocial is probably your best bet.
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You may not always get what you want, but you’ll get what you honked for.
I ran through the website but I couldn’t exactly understand what it’s supposed to do. Is it some kind of a CMS?
Imagine if Mastodon were not six processes written in three programming languages, but were instead a single binary written in golang using SQLite for storage. That’s honk.
It works quite well for me; I have a cheapo DigitalOcean server and I never have to do any maintenance, or worry about defederation drama making it hard to follow interesting weirdos.
GoToSocial matches that description even better since it provides Mastodon-compatible client APIs.
which part of the description does it match better?
Single golang binary using SQLite for storage?
Although, GoToSocial only provides the backend, you have to bring your own UI.
Edit: it doesn’t match the description better. (Just realized what you said, sorry.)
I assume donio meant to say GTS may be better since it’s API is mastodon-compatible so you can just use any available UI, like https://semaphore.social/ or any of the mobile clients directly.
Well, mostly. Because it’s not 100% masto-compatible (IDs are strings, not ints; rate limit headers are epoch seconds, not ISO8601, etc.[1]) a whole bunch of stuff doesn’t work (Ivory, Mammoth, Mastodon.py without tweaks, etc.)
[1] Which are compliant to the API spec but it seems a whole bunch of clients have (stupidly) ignored the spec in favour of copying what Mastodon does.
I think to @donio’s point, you’re missing a bit with this - it’s not just about the actual server infra being lightweight, it’s the interface as well.
No stars, no bells or whistles, just a spartan interface to read and post to your fedi feeds :)
I guess that isn’t not good.
Gonna have to try to run honk on 9front when I have time.