Socialhome v0.22.0 released, with a completely new UI!

This is a massive milestone for the #Socialhome project, one that could not have been possible without the hard work of @alain@jase.social. If you have followed the Socialhome project, you'll know that Alain has been responsible for most of the development of project in the recent years. This includes rewriting the #federation library to ensure #ActivityPub support is first class. More recently Alain has taken the challenge of rewriting the frontend, which has fallen into a rather poor state over the years.

The new UI work is actually a coordination of two people working many years apart. Way back years ago @lightone@mastodon.xyz made some UI designs for a new Socialhome UI (thank you! <3). While the designs were not implemented for years, they were not forgotten. In 2023 Alain jumped to the challenge and started the full UI rewrite of the Socialhome frontend. This UI has now matured into a state that it is good for daily usage - which is the main focus of this release!

Currently, a Socialhome installation will still default to the old UI. If you do want to try out the new UI for example on socialhome.network, go to the account settings and toggle the "New UI" flag. Going back is also easy, should the new UI cause unforeseen issues (please do report!).

If you are a server admin, see the new UI installation instructions for how to add the new UI to your instance.

This is not all! The releases of v0.21.0 and v0.22.0 also contain a bunch of other changes and fixes. Most notably;

• ActivityPub profiles are now richer, including bio and a larger picture, in addition to an avatar.
• Many new API's to support the new UI, including session authentication, search, media upload, content fetching over uuid, profile organize and profile settings.
• Whoosh has been replaced with Xapian as a search index backend.

See the full changelogs. Additionally, the federation library has received a ton of changes and fixes which can be found here.

Also, last but not least, we moved from GitLab to Codeberg. Check out the new repositories.

Installing and updating

We recommend using the Docker images (amd64/arm64).

Notes on how to use the Docker images can be found in the docs.

What is Socialhome?

Socialhome is best described as a federated personal profile with social networking functionality. Users can create rich content using Markdown. All content can be pinned to the user profile and all content will federate to contacts in the federated social web. Federation happens using the ActivityPub and Diaspora protocols.

Please check the official site for more information about features. Naturally, the official site is a Socialhome profile itself.

• Official site
• Documentation (for admins)
• Code repository (GitHub mirror)
• Chat room on Matrix

Try Socialhome?

If you want to try Socialhome first before trying to install it, register at https://socialhome.network and then ping us with a comment on the user name chosen to get the account approved. You can also request account approval in the chat room. This unfortunately approval step is due to spammers.

Contribute

Do you want to work on a Django and VueJS powered social network server? Join in the fun! We have easy to follow development environment setup documentation and a friendly chat room for questions.