Jaunder is an easily-hosted, multi-protocol social media application written
in Rust. It provides a unified approach to consuming content from federated
social networks (ActivityPub, RSS, Atom, JSON Feed, and Authenticated Transfer
Protocol (AT Protocol / Bluesky)) and publishing original content (short-form,
long-form, media) that is also pushed to those networks in whatever manner is
appropriate. The primary design goals are:
- Low operational cost: Runs on a Raspberry Pi or small VPS as a single binary.
- Privacy by default: User data is never shared between users, even on multi-user instances.
- Open standards: All producer and consumer behavior is built on open, publicly specified protocols — including W3C/IETF standards (ActivityPub, RSS & Atom, WebSub, WebMentions) and significant open ecosystem protocols (AT Protocol, JSON Feed). The architecture supports incorporating additional protocols over time.
- High fidelity: Raw protocol data is stored without alteration alongside a pre-processed normalized form. The raw copy enables reprocessing if normalization logic changes; the processed copy makes reads fast.
- Easy setup: Users should be guided through the process of setting up the system, and wherever possible, the system should validate their settings and make suggestions if things seem wrong.
- Easy maintenance: Good practices should be the default; for instance, backups should be annoying until they're setup.
Jaunder is intended to be easy to get set up. To bring up the service by hand,
one would do:
jaunder init # initial, guided database setup
jaunder serve
Additional configuration can then be done via the web interface.
Stop a ready local instance with jaunder shut-down. The command targets the
instance identified by the selected storage directory (for example,
jaunder shut-down --storage-path ./data), verifies its exact process identity,
and returns only after that process exits and relinquishes runtime.json. It
refuses missing, malformed, stale, or still-starting identities without changing
them. The wait defaults to 30 seconds; --timeout <seconds> accepts a positive
override, and timeout reports failure without escalating the shutdown signal.
By default, Jaunder will listen on http://localhost:3000/. To make this
publically accessible, you need to have a reverse proxy (Caddy is recommended)
that will listen on a publically accessible IP address and handle HTTPS.
If you are deploying with NixOS, import the shared module and enable the service:
{
imports = [ inputs.jaunder.nixosModules.jaunder ];
services.jaunder.enable = true;
services.jaunder.bind = "0.0.0.0:3000";
}For information on the design of Jaunder, see
the Design document.