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And you should learn more about lighter alternatives, too.
Update: Added a bit about the "chatter" tab, after tedu@ kindly answered my question about it.
I was chatting on IRC with some people about the fediverse, and the fact that many of them are growing tired of the biggest instances "policies". Everybody knows that mastodon.uno and mastodon in general, wants to become the new twitter, just look at the stunts they are throwing around for the sake of being "inclusive", with all the people leaving twitter. Add to that the fact that the admins there doesn't know how to moderate something like a BBS, and you see people like the ones I was chatting with searching for a solution to self-host, due to the, I must say, way too politically-correct policies those juniors are putting in place.
Everything to please the masses, of course.
So, they started to ask questions about self-hosting a pod, for one or two users. Of course, given that I already do something like that (and they all know about it), I was asked for advice. Naturally, I suggested Honk!
And then, I was asked to write something about it. Ok, challenge accepted!
This is NOT really a tutorial, but a bunch of tips and opinions from somebody running Honk for a good amount of time. I'll try to not be biased and I'll leave the technical bits to the excellent man pages written by tedu@.
After completing installation, start from honk(1) and proceed from there.
If you want to self-host a pod for yourself, or one or two additional users like you, Honk is the perfect solution. Honk is written in Go and, for instance, it uses only around 120MB of RAM in my case.
This means that you can easily self-host it on an existing VPS, rasperry PI, or any other low-consumption board (like the ODROID). It does not need a full-fledged RDBMS, but it just uses SQLIte! 3 and given that it's a self-contained binary, you have no external dependencies to run it.
If you come from one of the fediverse "big boys" softwares like mastodon or pleroma, you may be disappointed by the lack of some features like:
No federated timeline.
No local timeline.
Posts are public only.
You can't hide the front-end (like pleroma).
> No attention mining.
> No likes, no faves, no polls, no stars, no claps, no counts.
>
> -- tedu
And more that I probably forgot to mention.
As you can see, Honk is designed to be your personal fediverse platform and it is assumed that it will be always public. Everything you post, will be visible in your public page.
If you are searching something more configurable, or if you are in search for private communications in the fediverse, I suggest you to use pleroma instead. In reality, even if Honk could host more than one user, it's not really designed to do so. As I said, for more sophisticated use cases, like hosting 10-15 users, use pleroma instead.
The first thing to consider, is that if you come from a software like mastodon or pleroma, initially your timelime will be completely empty, the equivalent of the "home" in mastodon. Coming from there, you may feel a bit lost, given that YOU are in charge of discovering and adding your follows to your account.
If you read the man pages (as you should!) you may have noticed that Honk supports importing your user profile from mastodon, so you may start from there. However, I suggest to take this as a chance to do some cleanup, because for sure, you will have some follows you are not interested anymore (or some old accounts).
Personally, I have a grand total of 35 follows at the time of this article. A mix of people, institutions (like the EU) and project's pages (like RISC-V). I almost never go and search for new stuffs randomly, unless it's something I'm really interested in. However, I discovered that almost all the new follows I add, comes from people I already follow. This is due to the fact that, as a social, I share some interest with them, be it work, a hobby, or whatever else. For this exact reason I don't feel I need to go around discovering accounts that much.
Indirectly, if you follow someone and they answer to a thread, you will see your follow answer in your timeline, but with a click you will be able to see the complete thread they were answering to. Another way to discover new people and things. I find this one of the most useful features, given that it let me access complete threads even if I don't follow the original poster.
Sometimes I do a round of search, just to see if I can find anything interesting for me out there, but I end-up with empty hands, generally, so this approach does not work. However, when I'm interested about something, or just curious about what's going on somewhere (even if I don't really like it), I may search and add follows for some time, just to form an opinion on a subject.
Honk does support private conversations between two actors, in the "chatter" tab. I never used it, but I must say that it's not explained in the documentation. By itself, it implements the ActivityPub "ChatMessage". That is, a private message between two actors that will not show up in the timeline.
The final result is that even if, right now, I have a small set of follows I:
Share my interests with them (IT and whatnot).
Even if we are related, I see a lot of different point of views on various arguments.
Those seems to be people I would like to have around in real life.
The fact that Honk does not have a federated timeline, means that what I see, is not forced on others, leaving the fedivers clean from my private garbage.
In Honk, you can follow a user through a URL or the classic user's handle (@user@hostname), or you can subscribe an hashtag. I must say that I never subscribed a single hashtag in all of this time, only users.
Of course, subscribing an hashtag comes with it's URL, this means that anything in the remote server citing the hashtag, will be forwarded to you. As I said, I never used it, probably I'm lazy, but I don't feel the need for it. But I believe I should give it a shot, as a way to discover new things. Thinking about it right now, it may work. Honk has a "tags" page, where you will see all of the mentioned hashtags from posts you received. Clicking on a tag will show you all the posts mentioning it. From there, you may subscribe a tag, if interested.
Sometimes, I also check che "xzone", where the name of any honker you received at least one post from is mentioned there.
Honk supports "combos", nothing more than labels you can attach to a "honker". This way you will be able to have filters to see custom timelines (i.e. "Announcement", "News", "Cool" or whatever). I do use combos, given that when I open the client, the "Good" combo timeline is the first one I look at, given that it contains the accounts I follow that I care the most.
If you want to publish appointements or whatever, "events" is a useful tab. Just make a new post with a specific date and time format and it will appear there. I don't use it, but it's good to have it there.
I'm happy with my arrangements. It does not cause huge time wastes and I check my Honk two, three times a day, even less if I'm not in any active thread. Honk is so low overhead, usability-wise, that you may say it's even boring, for how well it works.
> 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.
>
> -- tedu@
Given the small amount of people I follow and given that I must curate the list myself, I have no filters in place, simply because, I don't receive garbage from the federated timeline. Filtering is applied at the entrance. If I have no reason to follow you, I will see nothing from you.
Of course, you will see boosts from accounts you follow and that's the only place I may have a usage for filters in my case. But again, curating my follows manually already put a "barrier to entry" in my home.
Anyway, you can filter by account, by instance (essentially defederating) or by specific content, your choice. I feel the system is powerful enough to cover all of a single instance user's needs. You can even rewrite content, with the filter mechanism if required, useful to boost something you want to edit first.
I encourage you to self-host Honk, or to self-host in general. An healthy fediverse is a distributed one. The mastodon monopoly must die!
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