Rostra is a p2p (or rather f2f) social network.
Rostra is a p2p, censorship-resistant social platform. There are no centralized user accounts, only self-generated, sovereign identities.
In Rostra users "follow" (subscribe) to other identities like in many conventional social network systems. Followers track, download and help share data of users they follow.
Rostra is a mostly-f2f ("friend to friend"), meaning there is no "global feed". Users can discover new identities and content only through existing connections.
Rostra comes with a support for "personas" (sub-identities), to allow publishing/following to/from a subset of person's identity. E.g. you might be interested in someone's technical work, but not their political opinions. By supporting sub-identities, users can remain wholesome and post without risking diluting their most popular aspects and/or alienating their followers.
Rostra is extensible, and can be used for applications other than Twitter-like-app, as long as it fits its general social-graph-based data model.
The discoverability story is bleak ATM, so you
probably want to follow me: rse1okfyp4yj75i6riwbz86mpmbgna3f7qr66aj1njceqoigjabegy
if you don't want to stare at an empty timeline.
A public instance is available at https://rostra.me/ , but it's advised to run Rostra directly on your system.
You can log-in in a read-only mode (eg. as me rse1okfyp4yj75i6riwbz86mpmbgna3f7qr66aj1njceqoigjabegy)
by not providing any secret, and view Rostra UI from the perspective of that user. You will not be
able to post or do any other actions that require the secret key.
You can clone the git repository locally and run:
cargo run --bin rostra --release -- web-ui
to start the web ui.
You can run Rostra using Nix with:
nix run github:dpc/rostra
The CI builds binaries:
- portable Linux x86_64 binary
- DEB package
- RPM package
Pick the last build and at the bottom of the page look for "Artifacts".
In the future, the official releases will come with prebuilt binaries as well.
Rostra is a p2p software, which means it will establish direct connections
between you and other users. If you would like to hide your IP for other
users for privacy reasons it is possible to run Rostra over Tor using
oniux
You can run:
nix run github:/dpc/rostra#rostra-web-ui-tor
to use a script to do so. See [flake.nix] to investigate how it works.
Alternatively, you can host Rostra on your server, and use it remotely over web-ui, in the same way https://rostra.me is working.
- Architecture overview
- Design decisions
- FAQ
- Comparison with other social protocols
HACKING.md- Github Discussions
Rostra code is licenses under any of your choosing:
- MPL-2.0
- Apache-2.0
- MIT
The code vendors source code for 3rd party projects:
- htmx - Zero-Clause BSD
- emoji-picker-element - Apache 2.0
- text-field-edit - MIT
- mathjax - Apache 2.0