A lightweight and powerful backend social networking server written in Nim. Pothole allows you to share your digital life without the constraints of modern, commercial social media!
Note: Pothole is a work-in-progress. A lot of features are missing and the codebase is still likely to change. In other words, this is still in pre-alpha stage. Using it right now isn't recommended.
Note 2: This is the main branch which contains a bleeding-edge codebase, which isn't stable at all for production environments. There will be a stable branch for you to download from when Pothole inevitably stabilizes.
A social media website (such as Tumblr, Twitter and so on) usually consists of two parts: The frontend and the backend. The frontend is the part of the website that is visible to everyone, it's the homepage, it's the app, it's what you usually use to post new messages. The second part is the backend which handles everything internally, There is no user interface at all, unless it's related to authentication. Pothole is the latter, it's a backend program that processes messages but it does not show them to you via a website.
The main goal with Pothole was for it to be a simple backend server that is as efficient as possible. When you set it up, it just starts processing messages, nothing more. A backend server is useless by itself so we've designed Pothole to also be compatible with the Mastodon API interface, which means you can install just about any Mastodon client and it should work out of the box with Pothole.
Sadly, Pothole is still very incomplete and it is way too low-level to use comfortably. You are better off using Pleroma, or you could also use GoToSocial if you're okay with some bugs and you still want a lightweight server.
Pothole is a low-level program, it can't setup a proper social media website on its own. You would need to setup a client or a frontend (Pothole is designed to work with Mastodon clients) and currently this procedure is incredibly difficult to do since there is no documentation on how to do it and I can't offer much help because there are so many clients/frontends to consider.
In addition, Pothole is still in development, a lot of things haven't been fully implemented yet and the codebase still changes constantly. If I have to give an estimate as to when it will become more stable, then it'd be far into 2025. There is still a lot of work to be done.
Install the latest version of nim, your favorite C compiler (gcc is recommended but use whatever modern C compiler you've got) and nimble. Run nimble -d:release build and it will build with release settings. (You will also need to install postgres as a library and database server somewhere.)
Pothole's main database is postgres, and so it expects an actively-running postgres server process in the background to work. You can change the database connection settings by editing the pothole.conf configuration file. If you don't want to (or can't) install postgres but you have access to docker, then you can run the potholectl db docker command to generate a postgres database docker container configured for pothole. potholectl can be found in the build/ folder when you finish building pothole.
Assuming the port in the config file isn't changed, Pothole starts running at http://localhost:3500, but do know that Pothole is meant to be a backend server. For a proper user interface, you need to supplement it with a client/frontend. And this is also just a basic demonstration setup, a proper setup would include a reverse and media proxy.
Copyright © Leo Gavilieau [email protected] 2022-2023
Copyright © penguinite [email protected] 2024
Licensed under GNU Affero General Public License version 3 or later. A copy is is available as the LICENSE file.