Fediverse + Soapbox(Rebased)

tldr: If you’re having weird problems installing the Soapbox / Rebased Fediverse software on your server. Maybe make sure you open port 80 and 443. That worked for me.

I like to get on the Fediverse for my social media fix. I’m not the tech savviest guy, but I do self host my own website for me and my friends to use. The software I use to get on the Fediverse is Soapbox with the Rebased backend. It’s a very nice way to interact and enjoy the Fediverse. The guy who develops it recently had a big update to it, changing up the backend too and for a small site like mine I decided to just nuke it instead of messing with it too much and starting from scratch. Things to take note of though, for future reference.

Great thing about the Fediverse is that you can make a back up of all the people you are following. I thought I did just that, but that seemed to not be the case. So double check that you have that csv file backed up properly. Now I have to hunt down for the folks I was following before.

The next thing is I had a heck of a time installing the software. The instructions were super simple to follow, but for some reason I couldn’t move forward. Long story short there was a port that I forgot to open. This isn’t in the instructions, but probably because I’m not using one of the recommended sites he suggested to host from or because it’s something basic most people now. I manually opened port 80, but I didn’t realize I had to do the same for port 443. I’m using Ubuntu so that’s as simple as typing in

ufw allow 443

You can make sure everything that should be open is by typing in

ufw status

Typing this up more as a reminder for myself in the future though.