ActivityHub - extending the mastodon feed with external content streams

ActivityHub merges diverse content streams (news, social media, videos) into a unified Mastodon feed. Using open protocols like Activity Pub and RSS, the service makes any RSS feed compatible. Users paste the feed URL, receive a user handle, and updates from the RSS feed are posted directly into their Mastodon feed.

repo structure

.
├── app           # contains source files of web app
├── backend       # contains source files of backend
└── terraform     # contains infrastructure deployment files

setup

After cloning the repo there a a few steps that you should run:

$ cd backend && mv .env.example .env
$ cd app
$ mv .env.example .env
$ npm install

Make sure you have go 1.21 or higher and node 21 or higher installed

local testing

to run everything in docker run

$ docker compose up

• api is listening on http://localhost:8080
• web app ist listening on http://localhost:5173

You can also run the api outside of docker. This can be helpful in the developing procress. For that run the following commands:

$ docker compose up postgresql pub-sub-emulator
$ cd backend && make run-local

• api is listening on http://localhost:8080

If you want to start the web app outside of docker with a dev server

$ cd app
$ npm run dev

• web app ist listening on http://localhost:5173

If you want to interact with Activity Pub services your local api needs to be addressable from the web. You can do that by using ngrok. Run:

$ ngrok 8080

Take the public URL you are getting and put it into the backend/.env file as HOST=ngrok.host. Its important to leave out the https:// in the beginning.