The Real Grunfink

Author of the #snac #ActivityPub instance server and other pieces of singular software. Not a real Grünfink. #fedi22

Public Key

npub1p77whr3cyukyulgej4qxyeee6gjxexumj4lsh9a40x0q4g5t72sqzq0jxq

NIP-05 Address

grunfink_at_comam.es@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsql08t3cuzwtzw05ve2srzvuuayfrvnwde2lctj76hn8s2529l9gqawmnrm

Author Public Key

npub1p77whr3cyukyulgej4qxyeee6gjxexumj4lsh9a40x0q4g5t72sqzq0jxq

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Last Notes

2024-11-09 04:33:47

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These lists are restricted and not disclosed in any way (unless, say, a bug is discovered in the future that leaks that information, and that will be fixed as soon as possible).
The only way an external viewer can infer about your contacts is by watching you interact with others from the Fediverse itself, or by looking at you public timeline (which can also be hidden by marking your account as private).

2024-09-15 11:25:40

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😆 I'm glad you like it. I'm a bit old and bitter, and it probably shows.

2024-07-31 16:01:50

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Great news! I'm glad to see it running on every platform possible 😆

2024-07-24 05:16:45

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You're welcome!
CC: @arcana@layer02.net

2024-07-12 12:48:20

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Fantastic news!

2024-07-08 15:44:41

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My pleasure.

2024-07-08 15:41:18

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You're welcome.

2024-06-18 05:55:23

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Hi, just wanted to tell you that, thanks to a contribution, version 2.56 of #snac will include optional auto-boost, in case you're still interested.

2024-06-15 14:16:45

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You need to obtain an API Bearer Token from your snac server and send it in an Authorization header. The full process is described here:
https://comam.es/snac-doc/snac.1.html#Implementing_post_bots

2024-06-09 18:31:56

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So true.

2024-06-09 17:48:14

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😆

2024-06-09 17:43:31

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Thank you so much. As a Debian user from like 1999, I love to know that my work is a part of it.

2024-06-09 17:34:41

I feel sorry and a bit unprofessional about announcing the quick release of version 2.55 of #snac, the simple, minimalistic #ActivityPub instance server written in C. It includes the fix to a careless change by me:
Mastodon API: fixed a last-minute bug that broke some API functions.
I apologize for any inconvenience. This week has not been very good for me, but that is no excuse.
https://comam.es/what-is-snac
#snacAnnounces

2024-06-09 17:11:38

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❤️ Thank you so much.

2024-06-09 17:11:22

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Thanks for understanding.

2024-06-09 15:32:05

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Thanks for your support.

2024-06-09 15:08:40

Hi, #snac users; it seems that I introduced a last-minute bug in version 2.54 that breaks some Mastodon API functions because I'm a moron 🤦
I'll release a new version ASAP fixing this specific bug.
I'm super embarrased. Sorry for the inconvenience.

2024-06-08 19:47:53

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Oh, sorry. Your post arrived to me correctly, but I somehow overlooked it (I'm having some messy days).
What do you consider must be changed in 'user_open()' ?

2024-06-08 18:56:09

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Great news! Thank you very much!

2024-05-18 17:43:57

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Great! Glad to see #snac working in all kinds of systems, specially the older ones.

2024-05-17 09:53:42

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What instructions did you find misleading? I would like #snac 's documentation to be as accurate as possible.
CC: @npub1z9f…l4qc

2024-05-14 17:43:16

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I'll take a look at it, thanks for the mention!
CC: @npub1l4z…edf3

2024-05-14 03:34:15

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Thank you very much for your support!

2024-05-11 07:45:51

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Yes, it does; at least, for the limited, perverse meaning of "federation" that Threads allow. I mean: you can follow Threads accounts with no problem and receive their posts and/or boosts, but you cannot reply nor interact with them in any way because Threads ignores interactions from the "real" Fediverse.

2024-04-19 05:00:00

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This is intentional and by design. I consider using metrics like follower counts as inherently toxic.
More about this:
https://comam.es/snac/grunfink/p/1711178049.868524

2024-03-22 09:04:03

I'm glad to announce the release of version 2.50 of #snac, the simple, minimalistic #ActivityPub instance server written in C. It includes the following changes:
Incoming posts can now be filtered out by content using regular expressions on a server level (these regexes are written in the filter_reject.txt file at the server base directory; see snac(5) and snac(8)).
Improved page position after hitting the Hide or MUTE buttons (for most cases).
Use a shorter maximum conversation thread level (also, this maximum value is now configurable at compilation level with the MAX_CONVERSATION_LEVELS define).
Fixed a bug where editing a post made the attached media or video to be lost.
The way of refreshing remote actor data has been improved.
Posting from the command-line now allows attachments.
Added defines for time to enable MacOS builds (contributed by andypiper).
https://comam.es/what-is-snac
If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/grunfink
This release has been inspired by the song The Raven by #CarolineLavelle.
#snacAnnounces

2024-03-20 18:55:47

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That's weird, I've never seen this. Using a higher level of debugging may say something. Also, using an external notifier like ntfy.sh may be useful.

2024-03-16 14:55:11

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If you type the URL to an image directly (without HTML tags), it should be converted automatically to an attachment:
http://img.stanleylieber.com/src/24160/img/1710293737.jpg

2024-02-28 09:35:06

I'm glad to announce the release of version 2.48 of #snac, the simple, minimalistic #ActivityPub instance server written in C. It includes the following changes:
A new instance page, that shows all posts by users in the same instance (like the public instance timeline, but interactive). This will help building communities.
Follower-only replies to unknown users are not shown in timelines.
Added verification of metadata links: if the linked page contains a link back to the snac user with a rel="me" attribute, it's marked as verified.
Added a new server-level configuration parameter: min_account_age. If this value (in seconds) is set in server.json, any activity coming from accounts that were created newer than that will be discarded. This can be used to mitigate spam.
Added a profile-page relation to links in webfinger responses (contributed by khm).
Fixed some regressions and a crash.
https://comam.es/what-is-snac
If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/grunfink
This release has been inspired by the album The Sudbury Inn by #Deleyaman.
#snacAnnounces

2024-02-12 12:44:21

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Thanks!
When you say snac does not requires a database, you mean all data is stored as flat files ?
Yes, exactly. I know this is technically a database 😆, but you don't need to install nor admin any SQL database nor any NoSQL oddity like Redis. As a friend of mine likes to say, you "don't need to become a dbadmin to run snac".
This also makes snac's storage easily portable from system to system, as a tarfile or rsync of the base directory is enough.

2024-02-12 10:20:12

I'm glad to announce the release of version 2.47 of #snac, the simple, minimalistic #ActivityPub instance server written in C. It includes the following changes:
Added pagination to the notification page.
The New Post... option now includes an optional field to set the URL of an ActivityPub post to be a reply to.
Fixed spurious notifications from the same user.
Fixed repeated mentions in the reply text field.
One-post only pages include the post content instead of the user bio in their metadata (improving post previews from other software).
Mastodon API: Added support for timelines by tag (for sites like e.g. https://fediwall.social to work).
https://comam.es/what-is-snac
If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/grunfink
This release has been inspired by the album Fire Hell and Holy Water by #GioliAndAssia.
#snacAnnounces

2024-01-18 18:57:53

I've just released version 2.45 of #snac, the simple, minimalistic #ActivityPub instance server written in C. This one includes fixes to some nasty bugs and some interesting contributions:
Fixed a collision in webfinger caching. This may affect federation with some software, so I recommend an upgrade.
Fixed crashes in some command-line options.
New command-line option state, that dumps some information about the running server and the state of each thread (note: this feature uses shared memory blocks and you may need an argument to the make call in older Linux distributions; please see the README file for details).
Fixed a bug that may leave an inconsistent state for a followed actor in a special case of repeated messages.
Mastodon API: added some fixes for integration with the Mona iOS app (contributed by jamesoff).
Added support for ntfy notifications, both using a self-hosted server or the official ntfy.sh (contributed by Stefano Marinelli).
https://comam.es/what-is-snac
If you find snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/grunfink
#snacAnnounces

2024-01-12 09:25:04

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This sounds fantastic! Thank you so much!
I'm unable to take a look at it right now, but will check your PR as soon as possible.
CC: @ntfy@discuss.ntfy.sh

2024-01-11 19:44:14

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I've just pushed a fix for this... would you be so kind to test it?
It seems codeberg is responding very slowly, at least from my side.
CC: @npub14w3…fupm

2024-01-11 19:22:43

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Mmmm... yes, it may be related to the webfinger mess.
I'll push a fix for this ASAP.

2024-01-11 18:16:24

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Hi. I have to check this. Anyway, @npub14w3…fupm Mona patch is probably not to blame, as the modified code is elsewhere.

2024-01-10 14:14:16

I'm glad to announce the release of version 2.44 of #snac, the simple, minimalistic #ActivityPub instance server written in C. It includes the following changes:
Fixed a nasty bug that caused the in-memory output queue to be corrupted under heavy traffic loads. This is a good reason to upgrade (thanks to Víctor Moral and Stefano Marinelli for helping me in fixing this).
Shared inboxes are now supported. This is not a user visible feature (hopefully, they will not feel any change), but it will significantly improve traffic for snac instances with many users and will open room for new features that are only feasible with these kind of input channels (this is not enabled by default; see snac(8)).
I've refactored all HTML code because it was somewhat of a mess; now it's much more maintainable (at least for me). I think I haven't broken anything.
Fixed crash in a special case of malformed query.
Mastodon API: some tweaks for better integration with more clients, and fixed a crash when processing boosts from kbin.
Fixed crash in the FastCGI code (thanks to Yonle for helping me debug this).
Added apache2 configuration information (contributed by Víctor Moral).
Added FreeBSD and NetBSD setup information and examples (contributed by draga79).
https://comam.es/what-is-snac
If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/grunfink
This release has been inspired by the album Until the Horses Come Home by #Undyed.

2024-01-08 16:29:28

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I've just pushed the fix to non-cached webfinger queries to the repository.
As always, thanks.
CC: @npub1fza…qg7t

2024-01-08 15:50:52

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I've looked in the source code and, yes, a webfinger resolution is needed to get the real url of the actor related to the user@host reference, but those calls should be cached. I was sure that they were, but obviously are not. Just another glitch in my memory 😅
A fix to this will follow shortly.
CC: @npub14ca…0nj8

2024-01-08 15:13:31

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I'm not sure why it's making this webfinger calls. I'll take a look at it, thanks for telling me about it.
CC: @npub14ca…0nj8

2024-01-06 13:08:13

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If you are experiencing slowness when posting or liking, please consider setting the disable_inbox_collection value in server.json to false. This is a feature that collects shared inboxes from all posts, so that all activities are posted to them even if there is no follow relation as a way to improve reaching instances. I'm aware that it's a bit of a perversion of the standard. I'm thinking about disabling it by default.
CC: @npub1c58…upnj @npub1c58…upnj

2024-01-06 13:03:34

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If you use rsync for transferring a snac storage, please ensure that you use the -H argument to keep hardlinks.
CC: @npub1fza…qg7t @npub1c58…upnj @npub1c58…upnj

2023-10-17 15:10:50

I'm glad to announce the release of version 2.42 of #snac, the simple, minimalistic #ActivityPub instance server written in C. It includes the following changes:
It's now possible to add profile metadata.
Accounts can be marked as 'private', so that they are not accesible from any non-authorized web UI (i.e. only through the Fediverse).
Outgoing connections that fail with a timeout are retried with a higher timeout limit. But, if the instance keeps timing out, it's penalized by skipping one retry.
If a post comes from a group or community (i.e. it has an audience field set), the buttons Follow Group or Unfollow Group are shown.
Pinned posts are never (incorrectly) purged.
Some RSS validation fixes.
Mastodon API: some tweaks to better match Mastodon behaviour in timeline entries and boosted posts are correctly returned, and some fixes for crashes.
Don't allow creating users which user name strings only differ in case. This was creating some problems (e.g. the webfinger interface doesn't allow case sensitivity).
https://comam.es/what-is-snac
If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/grunfink
This release has been inspired by the album On Giacometti by #HaniaRani.

2023-09-22 07:17:53

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Thanks for your words. Certainly, maybe I'm overestimating then number of people that decide to self-host.
Yes, the official Mastodon app not working is almost unacceptable 😆

2023-09-19 10:07:02

One year of #snac
If the source code version control history is to be trusted, I started developing snac (a simple, minimalistic #ActivityPub instance server written in C) exactly one year ago (Sept 19th).
It was not my first experience with ActivityPub: I had built a prototype version in Python some months before (hence the "2" in the snac2 repository name), and back in 2019 I made some partial implementation for an unrelated (and now forgotten) blog project, so the protocol was not totally new to me.
These are my thoughts about one year of development.
Why did I start it? Because I read somewhere about the (still baffling to me) humoungous requirements of a basic #Mastodon installation. I read a lot of people affirming that was the bare minimum: "it CAN'T be done with less resources". But I've always seen it as a glorified short message application and challenged myself to write a feature-complete #Fediverse instance with the following goals: keeping it small, simple, easily deployed, and lacking the bloat software tendencies of modern times.
Did it come out as expected? not totally sure, but probably yes. I even implemented more things that I originally planned (I initially said a big NO to myself regarding adding Mastodon API support, but finally did it and it works mostly well). The program is still somewhat small (a stripped binary of less that 300k probably counts). The no-database, no-cookies, no-javascript absolute rules still apply. I'm fine with the (opinionated) web UI that shows conversations as threaded trees instead of the plain, dull stream of posts that Mastodon or Twitter show. It cooperates pretty well with the always growing ecosystem of ActivityPub applications.
Was the time and effort worth it? On this, I'm not sure. I'm old and depressed and unemployed, so developing snac has kept my brain busy and entertained for a little while. But it has been more work that I expected: the ActivityPub specification is a bit diffuse in some areas, so every implementation does some things a bit different and many corner cases had to be implemented; some parts (specifically, the Mastodon API) have been very tedious to implement and test; and also, helping users debugging remote systems is difficult and very stressing for me. Fortunately, some fellow developers have helped me and I'm immensely thankful to them.
Has it been a success? I'm pretty sure about this: no. I thought that the small footprint, the lack of moving parts and the feature set would be attractive to a large base of users, but this has not been the case. Perhaps I've been unable to reach the neccessary potential users for it to reach some critical mass (a failure of the PR department 😆). Perhaps what I consider interesting features (minimalism, footprint, the web UI concept, Mastodon API compatibility, etc.) are not that valuable for most. Perhaps people disregard it just because it's not Mastodon. Perhaps there are errors and crashes that I'm not aware of. Perhaps snac is rubbish and I'm unable to see it. The reality is that snac is a niche and unknown part of the Fediverse ecosystem and there is no sign that the user base will grow from the current small fistful of deployments out there.
What about the future? I'm also not sure. Apart from some pending bugfixes and wishlist items mentioned in the TODO file, I've implemented all the features I initially expected and then many more, so I consider snac a finished program. New bugs will happen, that's for sure. New ActivityPub applications will show out there and, if experience tells me anything, they will all have slightly different protocol interpretations that will need some code tuning on my part. Development will continue; snac is a maintained program. But big changes will probably not happen anymore.
https://comam.es/what-is-snac
If you find snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/grunfink

2023-08-30 09:18:15

I'm glad to announce the release of version 2.41 of #snac, the simple, minimalistic #ActivityPub instance server written in C. It includes the following changes:
Added support for Article ActivityPub objects to correctly process reviews from #Bookwyrm instances and other similar software.
Show Link objects that are image, audio or video media as if they were attachments.
Added more aggressive caching to timelines and history files.
The history at the end of the public page is listed in reverse chronological order.
Mastodon API: minor fixes.
Be more strict when serving note objects.
Additional HTTP response headers can be defined by adding an http_headers object with header/content pairs into the server.json configuration file.
If you hover the mouse pointer over a vote option in a pool, the current count (as per the last update) is shown. This may be considered cheating in some cases, so try to be honest (or not).
The nodeinfo URL now returns more accurate information.
https://comam.es/what-is-snac
If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/grunfink
This release has been inspired by the album Plains of Elysium by #Madis.

2023-08-16 06:28:55

I'm glad to announce the release of version 2.40 of #snac, the simple, minimalistic #ActivityPub instance server written in C. It includes the following changes:
Announces (boosts) can now be disabled/reenabled on a per-people basis (to limit those boost-trigger-happy friends from flooding your timeline). This is operated from the people page.
It's now possible to show an instance timeline instead of the classic greeting static page at the base URL. This can be enabled by setting the show_instance_timeline field to true in the server configuration file. Other metadata fields can be set to add information to this page; please see snac(8) (the Administrator manual page) for details.
Users can now upload an image (preferably in landscape mode) that will be shown as a banner in their public pages.
Added hints to web UI buttons.
Mastodon API: some minor fixes to allow the semaphore.social web client to work.
Fixed miscalculation of the votersCount field in multiple-choice polls.
DNS or TLS errors in outgoing connections are considered fatal errors and not retried.
https://comam.es/what-is-snac
If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/grunfink
This release has been inspired by the album Seeker by #CarbonBasedLifeforms

2023-08-06 04:50:58

I'm glad to announce the release of version 2.39 of #snac, the simple, minimalistic #ActivityPub instance server written in C. It includes the following changes:
Added support for Follow confirmation messages that only return the follow request id (this fixes following Guppe channels).
Fixed some Gotosocial ActivityPub compatibility (details: support fields like tag and attachment being single objects instead of arrays).
Fixed ActivityPub outbox (it listed 'Note' objects instead of 'Create' activities).
Show the 'audience' field (channel URL) if a post has one (like pages from lemmy channels and other forums).
Some web UI tweaks: the new post field is hidden by default (wasting less screen space), added a 'back to top' link at the bottom of the page and other minor tuning to the HTML and default CSS (contributed by yonle).
Fixed RSS (contributed by yonle).
Fixed interactive text processes (like instance or user creating) by calling fflush() after printing text prompts (it was broken on systems that use musl like Alpine Linux).
https://comam.es/what-is-snac
If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/grunfink

2023-08-06 04:46:44

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Hi. #snac intentionally returns just a small subset of posts in the outbox (the newer ones). So you're right, the number is not accurate at all.

2023-07-17 08:43:46

I'm glad to announce the release of version 2.38 of #snac, the simple, minimalistic #ActivityPub instance server written in C. This release also includes some security fixes, so I recommend all users to upgrade soon:
More vulnerability fixes (contributed by yonle).
Added support for ActivityPub Group and Page objects. This allows subscribing to Lemmy channels and interacting with them.
Confirmation messages to follow requests are sent as soon as possible (i.e. bypassing the usual output queue).
Fixed crash when accessing some static or history objects.
https://comam.es/what-is-snac