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.

I opened a Soapbox Fediverse site to play with. Learned a couple things doing that, but when I installed it, certain features were not working the way they should under the soapbox-config settings (I think this was all under the newer Soapbox3 front-end). None of the buttons on the front-end worked. The fix was to just type it out in the Advanced: Edit raw JSON data section. Once that was filled out everything worked like normal. Here’s how my settings look. You can copy this and change it around yourself; put your own info in it.

{
  "cryptoAddresses": [
    {
      "address": "bc1qvjz2avgcyuh23s72dr3zgc3sltkgje7v35c4h9",
      "note": "Send some sats!",
      "ticker": "btc"
    },
    {
      "address": "t1g3kiDojaTyNBHCEc67B46q3cEJSJ92113",
      "note": "",
      "ticker": "zec"
    }
  ],
  "defaultSettings": {
    "themeMode": "dark"
  },
  "copyright": "♥2022. Copying is an act of love. Please copy and share.",
  "logo": "https://clyez.city/media/c67b745d-0097-4b8d-9c74-39d5c5e0bd3a/Rappy%20white.svg",
  "greentext": true,
  "cryptoDonatePanel": {
    "limit": 2
  },
  "promoPanel": {
    "items": [
      {
        "icon": "comment",
        "text": "Session",
        "textLocales": {},
        "url": "https://getsession.org/"
      },
      {
        "icon": "envelope-open",
        "text": "Protonmail",
        "textLocales": {},
        "url": "https://pr.tn/ref/CY79FTJWS3FG"
      },
      {
        "icon": "eye-slash",
        "text": "Privacy Redirect Addon",
        "textLocales": {},
        "url": "https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-redirect/"
      }
    ]
  },
  "navlinks": {
    "homeFooter": [
      {
        "title": "Need a Fediverse account?",
        "url": "https://jointhefedi.com/"
      }
    ]
  },
  "accentColor": "#9d954b",
  "brandColor": "#756573",
  "allowedEmoji": [
    "?",
    "?",
    "?",
    "?",
    "?",
    "?"
  ]
}

The only thing that continued not to work was the icon picker for the Promo Panel. In which case you can add that yourself in the JSON data section too. Just use an icon name from this site. For example I wanted the slashed eye icon so I had to add

 "icon": "eye-slash",

On the Soapbox front-end you can choose your own emoji reactions too. So just add and remove emoji in allowed emoji. I added the pinched fingers and skull ones.

"allowedEmoji": [
    "?",
    "?",
    "?",
    "?",
    "?",
    "?"
  ]

The guy who actually works on this, Alex, works his butt off and I think at the moment he can only take crypto donations. Check out his profile for crypto addresses and maybe send him some sats as thanks if you’re using his software. https://gleasonator.com/@alex