Anahita Services

Every kind of profile, in one service.

People

A profile at a username, made when somebody signs up.

Groups

Made by members, with administrators and followers; a group can host events.

Events

A start and an end in their own time zone, how many may go, and where to join online; going or maybe, calling it off, and a calendar file.

Websites

A website’s feed, followed like a profile.

Every kind

An avatar and a cover, followers, invitations, who may see and do what, and the same life from enabled to archived to deleted.

Who follows, blocks and subscribes to whom.

Follow requests

A profile can ask to approve its followers, and shows strangers only its name and picture.

Invitations

Up to 50 followers invited to a group or event at once; unanswered ones lapse after 30 days.

Blocks that hold

A block ends follows both ways, and is sent on to the fediverse.

Each person’s say

Who may mention them, and who may tag them in photos, or approve each first.

Group rules

A group or event with rules is followed only once each rule is agreed to.

The avatars and covers of profiles and posts.

Safe images

Each upload is judged by its bytes, turned upright and encoded afresh; nothing is kept as it arrived.

Addresses that stay

A public profile’s pictures keep one address, so other servers can link to them for good.

The graph every other service reads: profiles and posts are its nodes, and the ties between them its edges.

One gate

Feeds, search, notifications and recommendations all ask one check of who may see what.

Identifiers for good

Every node has a random UUID that never changes, used in every address other servers are given.

Threads in one go

Up to ten notes written as a thread are saved together, all or none.

Purges that finish

Deleting a profile’s posts goes in batches it can resume, and keeps its handle from being taken.

Notes, articles and topics.

Drafts

Articles and topics can be kept as drafts and published when ready.

Embeds and citations

An address on a line of its own shows the post or a card for the page; citations are counted and listed as “Cited by”.

Quotes by consent

Authors choose who may quote them, and can take their post out of any quote.

Who may reply

Anyone, nobody, followers, people they follow or people mentioned; and replies can be hidden.

Private saves

What somebody saves is seen by them alone: nothing is counted, and the author is never told.

Photo posts.

Up to twenty images

In one post, with one caption and one audience.

Alt text

A description of up to 2,000 characters for each image.

Nothing hidden in the file

Each image is encoded afresh at six sizes, never enlarged, so only the picture is kept.

Downloads by consent

Full size only if the author allows it, and never counted.

Video posts. A worker makes each video ready for every screen.

Straight to storage

The browser sends a video in parts directly to object storage.

Several sizes

MP4 at 1080, 720 and 360 by default, up to 4K, with a poster frame.

Nothing hidden in the file

Every file shown is encoded afresh, and the original is deleted.

GIFs as loops

Animated GIFs become silent looping videos, a fraction of the size.

Checked on every play

Each play checks again that the viewer may see the post.

Hashtags.

Any language

Letters of any script, digits and emoji, whatever their case.

Fair trending

Each profile counts once, only public posts count, and the window is the operator’s.

Suggestions while writing

Offered as you type, or from the title (“open science” finds #OpenScience).

From elsewhere too

A hashtag in a post from another server leads to this instance’s own page for it.

The locations posts are tagged with, and finding them on a map.

Open maps

Addresses found with OpenStreetMap’s Photon and Nominatim, which can be run yourself.

The operator decides

Who may add a location: administrators, anyone signed in, or super administrators.

Understood elsewhere

Up to five per post, sent to other servers in the form Pixelfed reads.

Nearby and trending

Locations within a distance of a point, and those used most lately.

Likes.

With permissions

Each profile chooses who may like what it posts: followers by default.

Lists that respect privacy

Who liked a post shows only the people its reader may see.

Across networks

Likes cross to and from the fediverse and Bluesky.

The chronological feed, reposts, and the custom feeds people make.

Chronological first

The first tab is always who you follow, newest first, and it cannot be removed.

Custom feeds

Made from sources, filtered by hashtag, keyword, location, language and kind of post.

Near me

Posts within 1 to 500 km, with the reader’s position never kept.

Never wider

A shared feed shows each reader only what they could already see.

Share, copy, pin

Feeds can be shared, found, copied and kept on the home page.

Search for people, groups, events, posts and shared feeds; the most relevant first, or the newest.

Old and useful

How fast interest fades is the operator’s to set: a year by default, or never.

Each person’s weights

Six signals each person can turn down or up, kept wherever they sign in.

Any script

“Montréal” and “東京” are found as typed.

Recommendations of who to follow.

Reasons, not a model

Worked out from the graph by written rules, and shown with their reasons.

In each person’s hands

Weights for each reason, “Not interested”, and not being suggested at all.

Replaceable

Leave it out, or run another service that answers the same way.

Notifications in the app.

Never emailed

Notifications stay in the app; a test fails if a service starts sending mail.

Gone with their cause

A deleted post or a like taken back takes its notification with it.

Grouped

“Worf and 2 others liked your post”.

Act in place

Accept a follow request, approve a tag or follow back, right from the notification.

Makes the instance a server of the fediverse, for the people who choose to be found there.

Both ways

Follows, notes, photos, videos, articles, replies, likes and reposts, with Mastodon, Pixelfed, GoToSocial and others.

Signed and checked

Each person has their own signing keys, kept encrypted; every message in is checked against its sender.

Delivered

Sending is retried for two days, and what goes missing is found and sent again.

Refusing servers

Super administrators can refuse a domain and everything under it.

Bluesky: following profiles there, and posting there for whoever connects their own Bluesky account.

For everyone

Anybody can follow Bluesky profiles from here, without a Bluesky account.

Post as yourself

Connect your Bluesky account to post, reply, like, repost and follow there.

Password never kept

The app password is traded once for a token, which is kept encrypted.

Bring your follows

Follow here the people you already follow on Bluesky.

Follow a website’s feed like a profile. A worker reads every feed and posts what is new.

Any feed

RSS, Atom or JSON Feed, from WordPress, a static site or a podcast; followed here and from the fediverse.

Proven domains

A DNS record or a file on the site, checked again every day.

Polite

Feeds are read every 30 minutes, or at once through WebSub, and less often when they fail.

Replies as the site

Its administrators can answer readers as the website.

The card under a note that links to a page: its title and picture.

Safe fetching

Web addresses only; private and internal addresses are refused, and every redirect is checked again.

Private reading

The picture is served from this instance, so reading a note tells the linked site nothing.

Cards that last

The card is kept with the note, and reads the same if the page changes or goes.

Reports of people and posts, and the cases administrators decide.

Cases, not piles

Everyone who reports the same thing joins one case.

Your own reasons

The list of reasons can be replaced with your own, in your languages.

Rules

A report can name a site’s, group’s or event’s rule; group administrators see those without the reporters’ names.

Reporters protected

The person reported is never told who reported them.

A copy of your own data, made by a worker and kept for a while to download.

Everything

Every post, private ones too, full-size photos and videos, follows, followers, blocks, likes and saves.

Readable anywhere

A web page in the archive works with no connection and no scripts.

Portable

ActivityStreams files that other fediverse software reads.

Asked for in person

Each copy needs a fresh proof of who you are, and is kept for 7 days.

Files, on any S3-compatible object storage.

Any store

AWS, Garage or any other S3-compatible store, with a test to check a new one.

Judged by its bytes

What a file says it is counts for nothing: an HTML file named photo.png is refused.

Private by default

The store stays private, and every link to a file is signed and short-lived.

Email, over SMTP.

Any provider

Any SMTP server or relay, with TLS.

Account mail only

Signing in and account messages; nothing else is ever mailed.

Safe while developing

In development, every message goes to the developer instead.

Serves Anahita Web, with each page’s own title and picture, so a shared link shows as itself.

The same for all

Crawlers and people are sent the same page; nobody is told apart.

Public only

A page is described only if its post and profile are public.

Handles on your domain

The fediverse finds @name@your-domain at the main address.

Brings the database up to date at each upgrade.

Three paths

A fresh database, an upgrade in place from the PHP Anahita, or the newest changes.

Proven the same

A test compares a fresh database and an upgraded one, column by column.