BNAkkoma: Brand New Akkoma

It's not that new. This is just a cheap pun on the title of a furry anime.

Also keep in mind that B in BNAkkoma stands for 'bleeding-edge', features can be added, changed or removed at any time!

If you are experiencing any strange quirks, make sure both your frontend and backend are up to date.

If your software are up to date but the bug is still there, ping me on the fediverse at '@itepechi@fedi.itepechi.me'.

What is this?

This is a fork of AkkomaGang/akkoma, with some opinionated changes to satisfy my needs.

The main differences between this and the upstream repository are

• Uses the official Elixir image from Docker Hub
• Automatically builds the Akkoma backend when building the Docker image, instead of requiring complex commands after pulling/building images
• Files/directories to be mounted are completely separated from the repository, making the image portable and allowing better control over file permissions
• Has an actual Docker entry point, rather than a command that pretends to be an entry point
• Includes out-of-the-box support for PGroonga, the fast and accurate full-text search extension for PostgreSQL
• Added support for searching media posts, which I really needed
• Added support to search for posts by/accounts of people you follow, which is nice to have
• Added support to search for local posts/accounts of the current instance, which is also nice to have
• These search extensions are configurable, so simply turn off if you don't want them
• Includes some improvements to the initial configuration wizard
• Added OpenSearch protocol support
• Improved PWA support, sort of
• Supports Podman quite well

How to setup (Podman Rootless)

You don't need to replicate backslashes followed by line breaks. They mean "Ignore the next line break" and are only used for better readability. a \<line break> b \<line break> c is the same as a b c.

0. Requirements

• A decent CPU
• 2GB memory (200MB runtime +300MB if you want to use Meilisearch)
• 500MB free disk space
• Podman runs as non-root user

1. Build your image

This will take 5+ minutes.

cd /YOUR/GIT/DIRECTORY/akkoma/
podman build -t akkoma .

2. Create a Podman Pod for Akkoma

podman pod create \
  --publish YOUR_PORT:4000 \
  akkoma

You can use pasta(1) if you want to preserve incoming IPs and easily access the host machine through the network gateway.

podman pod create \
  --network pasta:--map-gw,-a,10.0.2.0,-n,24,-g,10.0.2.1 \
  --add-host gateway:10.0.2.1 \
  --publish YOUR_PORT:4000 \
  akkoma

3. Set up the database

podman run -d \
  --pod akkoma \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  --name akkoma-db \
  -e POSTGRES_DB=YOUR_DB_NAME \
  -e POSTGRES_USER=YOUR_DB_USER \
  -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=YOUR_DB_PASS \
  -v ${PWD}/docker-db/:/var/lib/postgresql/data/:Z \
  postgres:14-alpine

If you want to use PGroonga, run the command below instead.

podman run -d \
  --pod akkoma \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  --name akkoma-db \
  -e POSTGRES_DB=YOUR_DB_NAME \
  -e POSTGRES_USER=YOUR_DB_USER \
  -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=YOUR_DB_PASS \
  -v ${PWD}/docker-db/:/var/lib/postgresql/data/:Z \
  groonga/pgroonga:3.1.1-alpine-14

4. Set up the backend

podman run -d \
  --pod akkoma-pod \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  --name akkoma-web \
  -e DB_NAME=YOUR_DB_NAME \
  -e DB_USER=YOUR_DB_USER \
  -e DB_PASS=YOUR_DB_PASS \
  -v ${PWD}/static/:/var/lib/akkoma/static/:Z \
  -v ${PWD}/uploads/:/var/lib/akkoma/uploads/:Z \
  -v ${PWD}/etc/:/etc/akkoma/:Z \
  akkoma

podman exec -it akkoma-web \
  pleroma_ctl \
  instance gen \
  --output /etc/akkoma/config.exs

A few notes on setup

• Make sure your database hostname is set correctly (e.g. localhost)
• Make sure your database password is set correctly, don't leave it as autogenerated
• You should set the IP to listen on to 0.0.0.0

4.1. Apply optional migration to enable PGroonga

This step is optional.

Make sure you apply the migration before the first restart of the container, otherwise you will be stuck in a loop of restarts.

To apply the migration after the first restart, please refer to the guide down below.

podman exec -it akkoma-web \
  pleroma_ctl \
  migrate \
  --migrations-path priv/repo/optional_migrations/pgroonga

You can revert the applied changes at any time by replacing migrate with rollback.

4.2 Set up Meilisearch if you want to search with it

This step is optional.

podman run -d \
  --pod akkoma-pod \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  --name akkoma-meili \
  -e MEILI_NO_ANALYTICS=true \
  -v ${PWD}/meili_data/:/meili_data/:Z \
  getmeili/meilisearch:v1.3

Don't forget to update your configuration to use Meilisearch.

# Example configuration
config :pleroma, Pleroma.Search, module: Pleroma.Search.Meilisearch
config :pleroma, Pleroma.Search.Meilisearch, url: "http://localhost:7700/"

To learn how to feed the Meilisearch index with your existing posts, if you have them, please see the guide below.

For other questions, see the official documentation.

5. Test your setup

podman restart akkoma-web
curl -I http://localhost:YOUR_PORT/

You should see HTTP/1.1 200 OK.

6. Set up the frontend

podman exec -it akkoma-web \
  pleroma_ctl \
  frontend install \
  pleroma-fe

podman exec -it akkoma-web \
  pleroma_ctl \
  frontend install \
  admin-fe

7. Create your first user

podman exec -it akkoma-web \
  pleroma_ctl \
  user new \
  YOUR_NAME \
  YOUR@EMAIL.EXAMPLE \
  --admin

Follow the printed link to set your password.

8. Bonus steps

Keep in mind that all of these steps are optional.

Switch to PGroonga

Before proceeding, make sure that config :pleroma, :database, pgroonga_enabled is set to false.

# Example configuration
config :pleroma, :database,
  rum_enabled: false,
  pgroonga_enabled: false

Then, run the command below to apply optional migrations to switch to PGroonga.

podman exec -it akkoma-web \
  pleroma_ctl \
  migrate \
  --migrations-path priv/repo/optional_migrations/pgroonga

After running the migration, change config :pleroma, :database, pgroonga_enabled to true.

# Example configuration
config :pleroma, :database,
  rum_enabled: false,
  pgroonga_enabled: true

Don't forget to restart your backend for the changes to take effect.

podman restart akkoma-web

You can revert the applied changes at any time by replacing migrate with rollback.

Change PGroonga indexing options

By default, PGroonga uses a bigram tokenizer with prefix matching enabled.

If you're not happy with this, you can change the behavior using the database set_pgroonga_options command.

If you want to support Japanese in your instance, and do not want "京都" (Kyoto) to match "東京都" (Tokyo-to), pass TokenMecab as the tokenizer.

podman exec -it akkoma-web \
  pleroma_ctl \
  database \
  set_pgroonga_options "tokenizer='TokenMecab'"

If you want to disable prefix matching, e.g. you want "akko" to match "Akko is cute!" but not "Akkoma is cool!", pass hash_table as lexicon type.

podman exec -it akkoma-web \
  pleroma_ctl \
  database \
  set_pgroonga_options "lexicon_type='hash_table'"

If you want to set multiple options, simply concatenate them with a comma.

Do not add spaces after commas or Elixir will complain. You have been warned!

podman exec -it akkoma-web \
  pleroma_ctl \
  database \
  set_pgroonga_options "tokenizer='TokenMecab',lexicon_type='hash_table'"

Initial indexing with Meilisearch

If you have posts that were made before Meilisearch was enabled, run the command below to index them.

podman exec -it akkoma-web \
  pleroma_ctl \
  search.meilisearch \
  index

9. Troubleshooting

PGroonga search not working as expected

Please make sure that you've applied all migrations using pleroma_ctl migrate --migrations-path priv/repo/optional_migrations/pgroonga, then set the options using pleroma_ctl database set_pgroonga_options.

Read more at 'Switch to PGroonga' and 'Change PGroonga indexing options'.

Fails to install Pleroma-FE

This sometimes happens. Try installing again later.

---

Akkoma

a smallish microblogging platform, aka the cooler pleroma

About

This is a fork of Pleroma, which is a microblogging server software that can federate (= exchange messages with) other servers that support ActivityPub. What that means is that you can host a server for yourself or your friends and stay in control of your online identity, but still exchange messages with people on larger servers. Akkoma will federate with all servers that implement ActivityPub, like Friendica, GNU Social, Hubzilla, Mastodon, Misskey, Peertube, and Pixelfed.

Akkoma is written in Elixir and uses PostgreSQL for data storage.

For clients it supports the Mastodon client API with Pleroma extensions (see the API section on https://docs.akkoma.dev/stable/).

• Client Applications for Akkoma

Differences with Pleroma

Akkoma is a faster-paced fork, it has a varied and potentially experimental feature set tailored specifically to the corner of the fediverse inhabited by the project creator and contributors.

This should not be considered a one-for-one match with pleroma; it is more opinionated in many ways, and has a smaller community (which is good or bad depending on your view)

For example, Akkoma has:

• Custom Emoji reactions (compatible with misskey)
• Misskey-flavoured markdown support
• Elasticsearch and Meilisearch support for search
• Mastodon frontend (Glitch-Soc and Fedibird flavours) support
• Automatic post translation via DeepL or LibreTranslate
• A multitude of heavy modifications to the Pleroma Frontend (Pleroma-FE)
• The "bubble" concept, in which instance administrators can choose closely-related instances to make a "community of communities", so to say

And takes a more opinionated stance on issues like Domain blocks, which are enforced far more on Akkoma.

Take a look at the Changelog if you want a full list of recent changes, everything since 3.0 has been Akkoma.

Installation

OTP releases (Recommended)

If you are running Linux (glibc or musl) on x86, the recommended way to install Akkoma is by using OTP releases. OTP releases are as close as you can get to binary releases with Erlang/Elixir. The release is self-contained, and provides everything needed to boot it. The installation instructions are available here.

From Source

If your platform is not supported, or you just want to be able to edit the source code easily, you may install Akkoma from source.

• Alpine Linux
• Arch Linux
• Debian-based
• FreeBSD
• Gentoo Linux
• NetBSD
• OpenBSD

Docker

Docker installation is supported via this setup

Packages

Akkoma is packaged for YunoHost and can be found and installed from the YunoHost app catalogue.

Compilation Troubleshooting

If you ever encounter compilation issues during the updating of Akkoma, you can try these commands and see if they fix things:

• mix deps.clean --all
• mix local.rebar
• mix local.hex
• rm -r _build

Documentation

• https://docs.akkoma.dev/stable
• https://docs.akkoma.dev/develop