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Comment by akerl_ | Hacker News Reader

I’d originally hoped to run my own, but I’d been expecting to see a variety of implementations to pick from and only found the official Ruby server.

Am I missing something, and there are other implementations out there that interoperate? Or is the reference implementation of this standard the only implementation?

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Yes there are a variety of implementations - perhaps you were searching "Mastodon" (the name of a single implementation) instead of "ActivityPub" (the name of the protocol)?

https://github.com/BasixKOR/awesome-activitypub#services

should get you started!

Disclaimer: I’ve only been looking into this for a few days, so I may say something incorrect.

My understanding is that there is a single Mastodon implementation, but there are a number of similar projects which can interoperate by sharing data via ActivityPub to become federated. Some of these other projects implement all/most/some of the Mastodon REST API so that GUI clients (phone apps, etc) can be used for reading and posting. There was an article on LWN recently which listed several of these with some commentary [1].

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/916154/

There are others, Pleroma was explicitly designed to be lightweight for small nodes, written in Elixir and thus running on the battle tested Earlang ecosystem BEAM VM. Also have heard and run across a few instances of Misskey which runs on node.js. Both use Postgres and I see from the install instructions the latter also uses Redis. Have heard of others as well but have no idea at all about them, a search on the above two backends will find you more.

You've also got some choices in front ends, I know Pleroma supports several. I strongly recommend not using Soapbox for a variety of reasons unless you really like its UI.

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