See below our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). The questions (and corresponding answers) below are in random order.
Mbin is an open-source federated link aggregration, content rating and discussion software that is built on top of ActivityPub.
ActivityPub is a open standard protocol that empowers the creation of decentralized social networks, allowing different servers to interact and share content while giving users control over their data.
It fosters a more user-centric and distributed approach to social networking, promoting interoperability across platforms and safeguarding user privacy and choice.
This protocol is vital for building a more open, inclusive, and user-empowered digital social landscape.
There exists an official ActivityPub specification, as well as several AP extensions on this specification.
There is also a very good forum post on activitypub.rocks, containing a lot of links and resources to various documentation and information pages.
Visit the documentation directory for more information. A bare metal/VM setup is recommended at this time, however we do provide a Docker setup as well.
You can join our Matrix community and ask for help, and/or make an issue ticket in GitHub if that adds value (always check for duplicates).
See also our contributing page.
New contributors are always warmly welcomed to join us. The most valuable contributions come from helping with bug fixes and features through Pull Requests. As well as helping out with translations and documentation.
Read more on our contributing page.
Do not forget to join our Matrix community.
Matrix is an open-standard, decentralized, and federated communication protocol. You can the download clients for various platforms here.
As a part of our software development and discussions, Matrix is our primary platform.
Mercure is a real-time communication protocol and server that facilitates server-sent events for web applications. It enables real-time updates by allowing clients to subscribe and receiving updates pushed by the server.
Mbin uses Mercure (optionally), on very large instances you might want to consider disabling Mercure whenever it degrates our server performance.
Redis is a persinstent key-value store, which can help for caching purposes or other storage requirements. We recommend to setup Redis when running Mbin, but Redis is optional.
RabbitMQ is an open-source message broker software that facilitates the exchange of messages between different server instances (in our case ActivityPub messages), using queues to store and manage messages.
We highly recommend to setup RabbitMQ on your Mbin instance, but RabbitMQ is optional. Failed messages are no longer stored in RabbitMQ, but in PostgreSQL instead (table: public.messenger_messages).
Execute: sudo redis-cli ping expect a PONG back. If it requires authentication, add the following flags: --askpass to the redis-cli command.
Ensure you do not see any connection errors in your var/log/prod.log file.
In the Mbin Admin settings, be sure to also enable Mercure:
When you visit your own Mbin instance domain, you can validate whether a connection was successfully established between your browser (client) and Mercure (server), by going to the browser developer toolbar and visit the "Network" tab.
The browser should succesfully connect to the https://<yourdomain>/.well-known/mercure URL (thus without any errors). Since it's streaming data, don't expect any response from Mercure.
Execute: sudo rabbitmqctl status, that should provide details about your RabbitMQ instance. The output should also contain information about which plugins are installed, various usages and on which ports it is listening on (eg. 5672 for AMQP protocol).
Ensure you do not see any connection errors in your var/log/prod.log file.
Talking about plugins, we advise to also enable the rabbitmq_management plugin by executing:
sudo rabbitmq-plugins enable rabbitmq_managementThis allows you to go to the RabbitMQ management page: http://<server-ip>:15672. More info can be found here. See screenshot below of a typical small instance of Mbin running RabbitMQ management interface:
If you wish to delete all failed messages at once, execute the following PostgreSQL query (assuming you're connected to the correct PostgreSQL database):
DELETE FROM messenger_messages;You can find the Mbin logging in the var/log/ directory from the root folder of the Mbin installation. When running production the file is called prod.log, when running development the log file is called dev.log.
NO! Try to avoid running development mode when you are hosting our own public instance. Running in development mode can cause sensitive data to be leaked, such as secret keys or passwords (eg. via development console). There is no log rotation enabled in development mode and development mode will log a lot of messages to disk (incl. stacktraces).
That said, if you are experiencing serious issues with your instance which you cannot resolve by looking at the log file (prod.log) or server logs, you can try running in development mode to debug the problem or issue you are having. Enabling development mode during development is also very useful.