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Honk: An ActivityPub server with minimal setup and support costs (tedunangst.com)
116 points by perihelions on Sept 11, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 27 comments


honk(1) manpage excerpt:

``` honk is designed to work with most browsers, but for optimal results it is recommended to use a 2015 or later Thinkpad X1 Carbon with 2560x1440 screen running OpenBSD and chromium at 150% scaling with the dwm window manager. This will enable the main menu to line up just right. ```

LOL



Reminder: A tiny VPS can be very cheap. The main cost of running an ActivityPub/Mastodon server is your time as a moderator.

The fediverse is based on federation. It tends to filter out unmanaged servers that host spammers, trolls, hate speech & similar.


A tiny VPS can be free, even a medium sized one. Oracle for example offers 4core aarch64, 24gb RAM, 200GB disk VMs for free.


Whatnow?


Yep - https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

Not sure what's the catch though, Hope someone else who have used it will enlighten us. If I have to take a guess, It would be network performance like most other inexpensive cloud infrastructure providers but the load balancer says 10mbps.


I'm using it for some personal projects, the only catch is that you have to input your credit card (so you do not create bogus accounts), and it is limited to a subset of regions. I personally do not use the load balancer, but the "normal" VPS do 1gbps just fine. I think it is capped at 10tb/month but I am not sure about that.

In general, I can highly recommend them.


Thank you, That sounds like good setup to save couple of bucks off side projects hosting.

Have you checked their security promises? AWS KMS like service would be bit too much to ask I guess, Considering they're VMs FDE should be fine?


They offer several kinds of encryption at rest, encryption in transit, but I haven't looked further into it yet.


Thank you, I tried the Oracle free tier and have written down the quirks I found here - https://abishekmuthian.com/oracle-cloud-free-tier-quirks/ .


To me it looks like a personal/small group publish only platform. The Honks can be easily syndicated to other platformes where replies and and discussions take place.

Looks like sound design for when you wish to have control over your output channel without bearing the burden of moderation.

Nice!!


> Do not use honk to contact emergency services.

Funny guy this Ted :).


He is. You should see his posts on fedi. He's also doubly cool for being an OpenBSD hacker.


Pardon my ignorance but what is "fedi", and where it it?


The fediverse[0]. A federated network of ActivityPub instances; honk is one such implementation.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse


Probably fediverse, but I have never used any of the sites myself.


I love the overall web design, by the way.


It kills my eyes... like actually makes it hard for me to see after a bit. Something about bright text on a dark enough background.


Maybe it's different for me since I'm on mobile but I was really bothered by the huge left margin that didn't match the size of the right margin


I’m not sure I understand what this is?


activity pub server


Tell us what an ActivityPub is. Give us some terminology like "honk". Tell us a little about how it works as a practical matter. Why we would want to originate one. Then, why yours is better.


This isn't a product the author needs to sell to execs/mouth breathers. This looks like a personal project, as such you can do your own research to figure out what it is.


Investing the work, to make it public, indicates at least the author is interested in selling it to some degree.


you can google it. ActivityPub is a protocol adopted by the w3c as a "recommendation" for interoperable social networking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub


> The honk mission is to work well if it's what you want.

> This does not imply the goal is to be what you want.

Unless this is an art project or considers obfuscation a virtue, you may need some help with marketing your idea (in the most charitable interpretation of the word marketing).

Writing with intent to provide clarity and understanding to the reader would be a first step.


Not everyone is selling a product nor do they care about catering to the lowest common denominator.




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