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Hello fellow citizens of the free and open web, it is me, Ben Brown. You may remember me from that social network from back when social networks were cool, or maybe from that one open source project that blew up.

Hi, it is great to see you again.

First off, corporate owned social media always sucked, we always knew it. It is past time for us to have better options.I am so glad for the #Fediverse and #ActivityPub and Mastodon and other projects for breathing new life into the indie web, where it is possible for us to own what we post and use whatever tools we want. I couldn’t resist building something!

My new project is called SHUTTLECRAFT. It social media server … FOR ONE.

What does that mean?

It is very small and lightweight open source app that runs nicely on services like Glitch, but it has most of what you need to host your own personal social media account.

It’s got a microblogging tool, to make posts. You can customize the design with HTML and CSS. You can follow people on Mastodon or other services and interact with posts and send messages. People can follow you on Mastodon, or with RSS. You run it on your own server so you own and operate the data and the code and the whole service. And you can hack the code and make it weirder so that we can all be part of a better, more diverse and more interesting web.

No billionaires or mega-corps required!

I made a 3 minute video showing how it works:
https://www.loom.com/share/a6441bcebdc64f54b5010c95eae1e180

Though this a personal project and only a few weeks old, with tons of stuff still unfinished and yet to build... you can get the code right now and run your own right now! The official site also has a 3 minute walk through of setting up an instance on Glitch. It is pretty easy!

https://shuttlecraft.net/

Or go straight to for the code:

https://github.com/benbrown/shuttlecraft

Thanks to everyone who has already tested this or sent feedback or contributed code. Y'all rule.

Own your posts!! Make it hard for them to monetize you!