Combine.social offers an easy and simple solution to missing replies in your home timeline or apparently empty profiles showing up in likes, boosts or follow requests showing up in your notifications.
Not all relevant messages are relayed across Mastodon servers. This is a problem.
The root cause is that servers only send messages to followers.
One side-effect of that is that if a person who you do not follow replies to a (non-local) message, then you do not see the reply. Similarly, any previously unknown user will show up as never having posted any messages, when they first appear in your notifications.
This software was built as a workaround for this problem. Ideally, Mastodon should be updated to just push all decendant messages to anyone it already pushes original messages to. That would cause significantly less traffic than this workaround.
As it is, we need this.
The main purpose of this software is to make your local timelines appear as if your small instance has all the combined messages of your instance and all of those of any other instance which has users you interact with.
Specifically, this means that:
- Replies to messages in your home timeline are fetched for up to 24 hours.
- Old messages are fetched for users that appear in notifications for up to 24 hours.
To get started, first install the build dependencies as described below.
This project is built using Turbo Repo. Node and npm versions are managed using Volta. Images are built using Earthly.
To install Earthly run:
brew install earthly && earthly bootstrap
See installation instructions for other platforms at the Earthly Getting Started page.
To install Volta, run:
curl https://get.volta.sh | bash
If you are using Homebrew:
brew install volta
Turbo Repo is installed as an npm dependency, and no manual installation is required.
To install all dependencies, run:
npm install
State is managed using PostgreSQL and Redis, and queues are managed using RabbitMQ.
Deployment can be done on any platform which has OCI image support. A docker compose file is included for reference.
To run locally, for development purposes, individual services can be started, e.g. to start the web frontend service, run:
npm run -w apps/web start
There are also VSCode launch definitions to start these services from with the VS Code IDE.
To run everything, run:
docker compose up
This will start the following services:
- Redis
- RabbitMQ, including management UI
- PostgreSQL, listening on port 5432 for easy reference if you have a psql client avaiable.
- Web frontend
- API backend
- Nginx, running as reverse proxy.
To test that everything is running smoothly, browse to localhost:8080.
Caveat: The build files assume that images are built and pushed to
ghcr.io/combine-social/timeline-<service_name>:latest. The individual Earthly files can be
updated to reflect wherever you want to build and push images to.
To build the images for production use, run:
npm run docker:build
To build and push (assuming that you have access to a Docker Hub account and are logged), run:
npm run docker:push
This will implicitly run docker:build if needed.
Combine.social is free, open-source software licensed under the MIT license.
You can open issues for bugs you've found or features you think are missing. You can also submit pull requests to this repository.