Zecharias Zelalem
Great to learn of a growing African presence on the fediverse. For the first time, I came across an Algeria themed 🇩🇿 instance, perhaps the first instance set up for and by an African community here (there could be others that I'm not aware of).
The instance is dz.social (Dz, short for the country's local name "Dzayer" and .dz is the country's internet domain code.
It's a start. Happy to see a Maghreb presence here. P.S Algerians are amazing people to befriend.
FediTips has moved!
There are some more African Fediverse instances listed here:
https://fedi.garden/tag/africa/
But would be great to see more!
silverpill
@rrb @raucao @ZekuZelalem What would you like to know? My instance is connected to a couple of I2P instances.
rrb
@raucao @ZekuZelalem Thank you very much.
Do you know the person to ask about fediverse I2P?
Râu Cao ⚡
@ZekuZelalem @rrb No problem at all. We also make our instance accessible as a hidden service. The steps are basically:
* For convenience, create an Nginx snippet for most of the config so you can easily add more domains/vhosts
* Set up Tor hidden services pointing to port 80 and 443
* Advertise the onion address via the "Onion-Location" HTTP header, so visitors can easily discover it when opening your normal domain in the Tor browser
Example config here: https://gitea.kosmos.org/kosmos/chef/src/branch/master/site-cookbooks/kosmos-mastodon/templates/default/nginx_conf_mastodon.erb
Zecharias Zelalem
@rrb A way to run Mastodon as an onion service? That would be top. If someone could integrate that, we would be really going places.
rrb
@ZekuZelalem does anyone have a way of running it as an onion service over tor?
I know people in West Africa who would adopt it then
Zecharias Zelalem
Mastodon penetration in Africa remains poor, and I'm not aware if that will ever change. There are numerous factors including language, culture, poor internet quality in certain countries and the general difficulty everyone has when adapting to Mastodon. The need for safe, clean platforms not at the mercy of legal requests from authoritarian regimes or data parsing by Saudi Royal shareholders...is a pressing one and will continue to be a pressing one. I'd like to see an African uptick here.
silverpill
@raucao @ZekuZelalem @rrb Tor/I2P instance can communicate with clearnet instance if clearnet instance is properly configured (only a few admins do this, but it's not impossible).
Râu Cao ⚡
@rrb @ZekuZelalem There's nothing special to the fediverse in this case. Just making your instance *also* available on a different network for client-to-instance communication.
If you want your instance to live exclusively on Tor or I2P, then you would create a new fediverse, which cannot communicate with the rest, since all normal instances run on clearnet and use DNS for addressing.
silverpill
@raucao @ZekuZelalem @rrb I saw this post about configuring Pleroma: https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2022/10/29/tor-over-fediverse-and-how-to-proxy-it/
They use Privoxy to route requests, and this approach may also work with Mastodon, although I haven't encountered Mastodon instances configured this way.
Mitra supports this kind of mixed federation natively: https://codeberg.org/silverpill/mitra/src/branch/main/docs/onion.md#clearnet-tor
Râu Cao ⚡
@silverpill @ZekuZelalem @rrb Nice! Have a link for what's to configure?
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.