Aster

Aster is a federated microblogging software (heavily in development) intending to include the fun features of software like Misskey and also the practical features of software like Mastodon.

I also intend to have a somewhat good quality codebase with limited repetition and similar style throughout.

Development instance (sometimes) available at https://dev.aster.pages.gay/. It's run through a Cloudflare tunnel and is on my computer, so it's only up when I'm working on it.

Requirements

• NodeJS
• pnpm
• PostgreSQL
• DragonflyDB

Latest of all of these are best

Setup

Install dependencies with pnpm i and then build with pnpm build.
Afterward, copy ./config/example.ini to ./config/production.ini and update it to your liking.
It is recommended you set the logging to fancy during initial setup.
After configuration, run pnpm migrate to set up your database, and then you're good to go!
Run pnpm start and your instance will start up.

Project Status

AP

Endpoints done:

• /user/:id
• /user/:id/inbox
• /note/:id

Endpoints in progress:

• /user/:id/followers (OrderedCollection of following actors)
• /user/:id/following (OrderedCollection of followed actors)
• /user/:id/outbox (OrderedCollection of recently sent public activities. Do I even do this? Does anyone even use it?)

Endpoints needed:

• /note/:id/replies (OrderedCollection of Links to Note objects*)
• /note/:id/likes (OrderedCollection of Links to Like activities*)
• /note/:id/shares (OrderedCollection of Links to Announce activities*)

*or entire object with LD signature, to save time on the fetching end. I need to look into the best way to implement this further.

Activities Sent:

• Accept
  • Follow
• Reject
  • Follow
• Create
  • Note
• Like
  • Note
• Announce
  • Note

I'm thinking of sending Create(Actor()) to instances with followers to local since I process that

Activities Processed:

• Accept
  • Follow
• Create
  • Note
  • Actor
• Like
  • Note
• Announce
  • Note

Federation

• Supports nodeinfo 2.0 and 2.1
• host-meta works neatly
• webfinger implemented, and has high tolerance of formatting (eg. resource can be @user@host, user, @user, user@host, etc.)
• json and xml supported! for the most part!

API

• Get note
• Create notes
• Create notes with replies or quotes
• Create repeats
• Register
• Login
• Get user
• Get instance metadata
• Moderate remote instances (admin)
• Get moderated remote instances (admin)

TODO

• handle robots.txt from backend, generate from config
• favicon
• use backfill queue (reply, quote)

Development

devenv up automatically starts a fresh postgres instance, creates a database and user with the correct permissions, and a redis instance.

devenv shell opens a shell with helpful aliases and automatically adjusts which config is used by aster, so you don't have to modify the config to start.

you can use direnv to automatically start the devenv shell when in aster