Snac

★★★★☆

Snac reminds me of an old Web 1.0 guestbook (minus the garish backgrounds and colors) – except it’s actually talking with the Fediverse!

It’s an extremely bare-bones social networking server that you can still use to post text and images, and follow and interact with people on the same or other servers using ActivityPub such as Mastodon, PixelFed, GoToSocial and so on.

There’s a simple web view for public posts and a simple view for logged-in users. And it works without cookies or JavaScript. It’ll even run on the comparably bare-bones web browser Dillo. Current versions are also compatible with Mastodon apps like Tusky or Elk.

It’s not ideal if you follow a lot of other people. In fact a lot of the design choices and missing features are to discourage you from spending too much time on social media. But it’s good if you want to take a deliberate, focused approach to networking.

Hosting Notes

It’s a single process, uses files instead of a database, and takes all of 10 seconds to compile from source. Updating is generally a matter of pulling the latest code and running make clean; make; sudo make install.

Last I looked, Mastodon required three Docker containers just to run. And updating? Major admin tax, there! (It’s even the prime example!) Even GoToSocial, which is quite capable of running well on a low-end machine and a heck of a lot simpler to manage, is bulky by comparison.

Snac? I once saw someone remark that they’d put it on a server that was doing something else, and the resource usage was “a rounding error.” And that’s part of why I’ve kept my test server running. You can see Snac in action at @KelsonTalksTech@snac24.keysmash.xyz.

GoToSocial and Snac are both designed for sites with a smallish number of local users who can talk to each other and the broader Fediverse. I ran test instances of both for several months before settling on GoToSocial for my particular use case, which involved longer threads and faster timelines than Snac is built for.

Finally, I’d like to give a shout-out to the author, Grunfink, who comes off as snarky in the documentation, but has been friendly and helpful whenever I’ve reported a bug or suggested a change.