Federated blog example using Fedify and Astro

Warning

This program is for educational purposes only. Do not use it for any other purpose, since it has not been thoroughly tested for security.

This is a simple federated blog example using Fedify and Astro. Blog posts are authored as Markdown files and built to static HTML at build time, while ActivityPub federation is handled by server-side routes. The features of this program are:

• Blog posts authored as Markdown files in src/content/posts/
• The blog author can be followed by other actors in the fediverse
• A follower can unfollow the blog
• Blog posts are delivered to followers as ActivityPub activities
• Remote users can reply to posts, and replies are shown on the blog

Since it is a simple example for educational purposes, it has a lot of limitations:

• The blog author's profile cannot be configured without editing source files
• No likes or shares of posts
• No search feature
• No authentication or authorization for the web interface
• In-memory key-value store and message queue (resets on restart) in early chapters; SQLite is introduced later in the tutorial

Tutorial

This repository accompanies the Building a federated blog tutorial on the Fedify website. The tutorial walks through building this project step by step, starting from fedify init and ending with receiving comments from the fediverse.

Dependencies

This program is written in TypeScript and uses Bun. You need to have Bun 1.0.0 or later installed on your system to run this program.

It also depends on a few external libraries besides Fedify:

• Astro for the web framework and static site generation
• bun:sqlite for the database (followers, comments, and key pairs)
• A few other libraries; see package.json for details

How to run

To run this program, you need to install the dependencies first. You can do that by running the following command:

bun install

After installing the dependencies, you can start the development server using the following command:

bun run dev

This will start the program on port 4321. You can access the blog by visiting http://localhost:4321/ in your web browser. However, since this program is an ActivityPub server, you need to expose it to the public internet to communicate with other servers in the fediverse. In that case, you can use the fedify tunnel command.

License

This program is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.