Can someone explain to me how it makes any sense for Pixelfed to be a thing that has its own accounts, rather than being an ActivityPub client whose GUI just happens to be image-focused?
Apropos of nothing, I remember some guy who spent most of the 90s having people tell him that it was insane to combine a mail reader and a usenet reader into the same app, because they are completely different software platforms that serve completely different intents and have different feature sets.
Oh wait, that was me. The guy was me.
@jwz BRB just putting the finishing touches on my NNTP/ActivityPub gateway.
(It would not surprise me to discover such a thing exists, and someone’s using Mozilla in a VM to access it.)
@waider @jwz Illuminant is the NNTP to ActivityPub gateway you can run today! https://koldfront.dk/git/illuminant/about/
I am installing this today! Now I have to see if I can find a copy of MT-Newswatcher!
Great! Let me know how it goes :-)
Thus far I still don't have it running. Here's my suggestions/fixes for the issues I saw.
1. There is a SQL error in the init file. In the definition of the "object" table there is a missing comma that you have to fix to get the DB created.
2. Unfamiliar as I am with cabal and ghc, getting it built was really difficult. I didn't know I had to use specific versions of gchc or it couldn't get a version of build that would match constraints.
1/
3. Once I got it built, it was an easter egg hunt to actually find the binaries. I'd suggest build step that symlinks, copies or moves the binaries to a ./bin directory or the equivalent.
4. After all that, I try to run the binaries and they all need this SITE.conf config file. I have no idea what is in that or how to write it. Directions or at least an example in the README file would go a long way.
2/
All that said, I thank you for doing this. I remain straight up excited about using this because as a person whose introduction to the online world was BBSes, then GEnie and Compuserve and then Usenet, I still have enormous fondness for NNTP readers. I think I persisted more than your average bear because I want so badly to use this. You are almost there, a tiny bit more work will open this up to more people.
3/3
Thanks for giving it a go and for the feedback!
I have fixed the missing comma and will try to address the other points as well. Much obliged.
@asjo I tried to reverse engineer the config file. I created JSON with the same fields as Config.hs but always get a "could not parse config file" error. Can you just post your config in a reply with the passwords elided? I also didn't know what "admin" means, the name of the admin user in the app, a Linux user or what.
thanks!
The config file is in the code repository: illuminant.conf - no need to reverse engineer.
Oh, and the format isn't JSON, so that's why it didn't parse :-)
I have updated the Illuminant README with instructions on how to build on Debian 12 (bookworm, stable), and while testing that on a virtual machine, I also adjusted illuminant.cabal to make it work - I had to put a lower bound on the version of network-simple-tls and an upper bound on http-conduit.
Hopefully this makes it easier for anyone else trying #Illuminant out in the future.
@asjo Great! Thank you.
I am **almost** there. I have 2 running but the nntp server is failing on the cert and key. I used certbot but it created .pem files. This seems to be the last thing between myself and operating. I see the HTTP status page.
I also hadn't put in the gensaltedhash
command, I have done so now, with instructions on building it.
@asjo After some googling, I got the .key and .crt out of the .pem files. illuminant-nntp is running. Next step is to actually try to connect.
Cool! You'll need the output from gensaltedhash
in the "password" field of your record in the "user" table.
3: Yes, I was baffled for a while on how to find the path to the binaries. I have a script to update and deploy on my server, which I realize I haven't fed back into the README.md nor written about anywhere.
This is how I do it:
cabal install exe:illuminant-http --install-method=copy --overwrite-policy=always --installdir=/usr/local/bin/
cabal install exe:illuminant-nntp --install-method=copy --overwrite-policy=always --installdir=/usr/local/bin/
cabal install exe:illuminant-background --install-method=copy --overwrite-policy=always --installdir=/usr/local/bin/
(after stopping each service).
4: Yikes, did I forget to write about that after implementing it? Ugh.
To be fair, it is in the source code repository.
1: Oh, I probably didn't make a new database and just edited the file and did ALTER TABLE - I will fix that ASAP.
2: Ah, yes, I just build on Debian 12 (bookworm, stable) after installing ghc and some libghc-*-dev packages. That part is not well documented either.
Thanks for the feedback!
@PuercoPop @waider @jwz So help me Xenu I _will_ implement the inverse, a thing to expose an archive of alt.religion.scientology as an ActivityPub endpoint in real time starting from 2007
@PuercoPop @xan @jwz who is “Pandora” and why can’t I get the lid back on this box
@PuercoPop This is glorious!
@fritter Inded! The author, @asjo, has other interesting NNTP projects https://koldfront.dk/just_call_me_mr_nntp_1871