Pherephone

A Pherephonon in Greek is someone who doesn't have his own voice and just repeats things other said. Pherephone is an ActivityPub relay. You set it up to follow a few accounts and it Announces everything they post.

Use cases

Pherephone is meant to bring multiple fediverse accounts, even across platforms, into a single followable ActivityPub Actor.

For example, you might have multiple Mastodon accounts, or mix them with PixelFed profiles, WriteFreely blogs, and PeerTube channels. Pherephone makes it easy to give your audience a single handle to follow all of them at once.

How to run

Download the binary, edit config.ini and actors.json to your liking and run it. For the time being only the ActivityPub actor endpoint is supported. Usually the url of the user profile page will work. If it doesn't you will have to find it out using webfinger yourself. Here is an example on how to find my actor endpoint on fosstodon.

https://fosstodon.org/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:qwazix@fosstodon.org

There's a -debug flag if you want more verbose output.

Actors configuration

{
    "writefreelyAndFriends" : {
        "summary": "a list of favorite writers",
        "follow": [
            "https://write.as/api/collections/blog",
            "https://writing.exchange/users/write_as"
        ]
    },
    "all_about_qwazix" : {
        "summary": "wanna stalk me?",
        "follow": [
            "https://pixelfed.social/users/qwazix",
            "https://print3d.social/users/qwazix",
            "https://mixt.qwazix.com/api/collections/qwazix",
            "https://fosstodon.org/api/collections/qwazix"
        ]
    }
}

Pherephone will create the accounts writefreelyAndFriends@example.com and all_about_qwazix@example.com and follow the users listed under each one. If you want to unfollow someone just remove any entry. Unfortunately json doesn't support comments so you'll have to delete it altogether. Mind the commas (there's no comma after the last entry)

Web server configuration and https

You will probably want to run it behind a reverse proxy with a Let's Encrypt certificate.

Here's the configuration for apache. You can find similar nginx configuration in the writefreely documentation

<VirtualHost *:443>
    ServerAdmin q@qzx.gr
    ProxyRequests off
    DocumentRoot /var/www
    ProxyPreserveHost On

    ServerName pherephone.example.com

    ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/error.log
    CustomLog /var/log/httpd/access.log combined

    SSLEngine on
	SSLCertificateFile "/etc/letsencrypt/live/pherephone.example.com/fullchain.pem"
	SSLCertificateKeyFile "/etc/letsencrypt/live/pherephone.example.com/privkey.pem"

    # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
    # alert, emerg.
    LogLevel error

    <Location />
        ProxyPass http://localhost:8081/
        ProxyPassReverse http://localhost:8081/
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Location>
</VirtualHost>

General Configuration

There are four configuration values in Pherephone

[general]

baseURL = https://example.com
storage = storage ; can be relative or absolute path
userAgent = "pherephone"
announce_replies = false ; whether to boost replies of followers by default

The baseURL which is, erm, self-explanatory. Set it to your (sub)domain. storage which is the path where pherephone will save its data. Pherephone only uses json files in a directory structure to save its data. userAgent just sets the user agent string reported by the software announce_replies controls whether pherephone will boost everything the actors it follows post or only original posts.