Squirrelpub

What if ActivityPub and ATProto smoked crack and had an ugly child which they forced to be statically hostable?

Squirrelpub is a not serious and purely experimental federated social protocol.

This is a JS/TS library built in Deno 2 for fetching and working with Squirrelpub objects.

Note

This is a weekend experiment mostly to (re)familiarize myself with the JS/TS ecosystem. I am making also a frontend app with React and Angular, and at some point also a backend, likely with Express or perhaps I’ll try a Rust framework. I like services like Mastodon & the Fediverse and such, but to put it lightly, they have issues, including total UX failures. I’m experimenting with ways to alleviate these, while making it stupidly easy to self-host your own social-media profile and content.

How It Works

Your ID is a domain hostname, for example example.squirrelpub.com.

You have to prefix squirrelpub. to the ID in order to get the final hostname.
The final hostname bocomes squirrelpub.example.squirrelpub.com in this example.

In order to fetch the identity, do a Https GET request to the Squirrelpub endpoint like so:

https://squirrelpub.example.squirrelpub.com/.squirrelpub/identity

The response will be the Squirrelpub identity object.

Minimal identity example

{
	"squirrelpub": {
		"type": "identity"
	},
	"id": "example.squirrelpub.com",
	"profile": {
		"name": "Example Squirrelpub Identity"
	},
	"streams": {
		"post": {
			"url": "https://squirrelpub.example.squirrelpub.com/.squirrelpub/streams/post"
		},
		"subscribed": {
			"url": "https://squirrelpub.example.squirrelpub.com/.squirrelpub/streams/subscribed"
		},
		"subscribers": {
			"url": "https://squirrelpub.example.squirrelpub.com/.squirrelpub/streams/subscribers"
		},
	}
}

Full identity example

{
	"squirrelpub": {
		"type": "identity",
		"version_major": 0, "version_minor": 0,
		"signature": "https://squirrelpub.example.squirrelpub.com/.squirrelpub/identity/verify.txt"
	},
	"id": "example.squirrelpub.com",
	"verify_public_key": {
		"algorithm": { "name": "Ed25519" },
		"key": {
			"kty": "OKP",
			"crv": "Ed25519",
			"x": "THvD7wsl82IY9hB0w3R6AGTWUfshDyC5LVWGLZrRpnE",
			"key_ops": [ "verify" ],
			"ext": true
		}
	},
	"alias_identities": [
		"example.somwhereelse.pub",
		"this.one.just.backs.everything.up.on.my.raspberrypi.mydomain.com"
	],
	"primary_alias": "example.squirrelpub.com",
	"created_timestamp": "2024-11-06T02:56:19.767Z",
	"profile": {
		"name": "Example Squirrelpub Identity",
		"description": {
			"type": "text/markdown",
			"content": "Hi\nI'm an example **Identity** on **Squirrelpub**!"
		},
		"links": [
			{
				"name": "GitHub",
				"url": "https://github.com/emperorofmars/libsquirrelpub"
			}
		],
		"tags": [
			{
				"type": "squirrelpub.fluffy",
				"displayname": "Fluffy",
				"value": true
			},
			{
				"type": "squirrelpub.fursone_species",
				"name": "Species",
				"value": "Squirrel"
			},
			{
				"type": "scom.quirrelpub.pronouns",
				"name": "Pronouns",
				"value": "example/test"
			}
		]
	},
	"streams": {
		"post": {
			"url": "https://squirrelpub.example.squirrelpub.com/.squirrelpub/streams/post",
			"replications": ["https://backup.somewhere.else.com/atsomepath/post"]
		},
		"reply": {
			"url": "https://squirrelpub.example.squirrelpub.com/.squirrelpub/streams/reply",
			"replications": ["https://backup.somewhere.else.com/atsomepath/reply"]
		},
		"command": {
			"url": "https://squirrelpub.example.squirrelpub.com/.squirrelpub/streams/command",
			"replications": ["https://backup.somewhere.else.com/atsomepath/command"]
		},
		"subscribed": {
			"url": "https://squirrelpub.example.squirrelpub.com/.squirrelpub/streams/subscribed",
			"replications": ["https://backup.somewhere.else.com/atsomepath/subscribed"]
		},
		"subscribers": {
			"url": "https://squirrelpub.example.squirrelpub.com/.squirrelpub/streams/subscribers",
			"replications": ["https://backup.somewhere.else.com/atsomepath/subscribers"]
		},
		"deny": {
			"url": "https://squirrelpub.example.squirrelpub.com/.squirrelpub/streams/deny",
			"replications": ["https://backup.somewhere.else.com/atsomepath/deny"]
		},
		"past_public_keys": {
			"url": "https://squirrelpub.example.squirrelpub.com/.squirrelpub/streams/past_public_keys",
			"replications": ["https://backup.somewhere.else.com/atsomepath/past_public_keys"]
		}
	},
	"services": {
		"cache": {
			"url": "https://squirrelpub.example.squirrelpub.com/.squirrelpub/services/cache_service"
		},
		"federation_registry": {
			"url": "https://squirrelpub.example.squirrelpub.com/.squirrelpub/services/federation_registry"
		},
		"stream_registry": {
			"url": "https://squirrelpub.example.squirrelpub.com/.squirrelpub/services/stream_registry"
		}
	},
	"federation_anchors": [
		"example.squirrelpub.com",
		"squirrelpub.com",
		"example.com"
	]
}

This identity can be easily statically hosted, including on GitHub Pages!

Simply create a file named index.json at the path .squirrelpub/identity/ and throw it at the Deploy static content to Pages GitHub Action!

See a more examples in this repository at ./example/.squirrelpub.