I've been testing #snac2 for a few days now, more specificly I want to see if it can replace my #friendica installation that I have been using since 2019. This will be a somewhat longer piece that is also meant to see how Snac copes with longer Markdown formatted text.
First things first. Friendica is awesome. It is the everything and the kitchen sink of the Fediverse and does a lot of things right. The only downside I see is the reason why I am looking for an alterantive though. Over time it has become harder and harder to host Friendica on my vserver with 8GB of RAM. I could of course opt for a bigger server, but honestly I am only using a fraction of Friendica's features and would prefer something less demanding.
Snac is lightweight, easiy to install, uses no database and does not even require coockies or Javascript in its Web-UI. I mean, how cool ist that!
Compared to Friendica, its featureset is basic at best. But compared to other Fediverse tools like
#mastodon it does not fare so bad. But how usable is it as an alternative to my peronal Friendica use.
The good stuff
- Setup is really easy for anyone who has self-hosted any services before. The documentation in manpage format might be old school but it is very complete - read it. If you're on Debian you can even use the package from trixie-backports which is kept very current!
- It shows the timeline chronologically but with nested threads. This is the only way that makes sense to me and is exactly what I use in Friendica (where different settings are available). This means every new activity on a thread brings it up again (partly collapsed) so you always see the necessary context to follow conversations. For me this is the most important feature, I would not even have continued testing without it. Snac just does it right!
- It has the looks! Well at least after applying some stylesheets. Calling the vanilla install basic would already be an overstatement. But have a look at the styles that are linked from snac's Reaedme. I chose the next.css style and have attached an image of how it looks below. The screenshot is from an Android phone and this works remarkably well, even on mobile (some caveats below)!
- It's compatible with Mastodon apps. I have only tested #Fedilab because I use it for other stuff too. Everything just works as expected. Although I have to admit, I like the native Web-UI (next.css) even more.
- Long Text with Markdown formatting. 500 character per Toot - No thank you, I am not chatting here!
What is missing (or is it?)
- There is only the timeline and you can follow Hashtags, that's it. No Channels, no groups, no theme-specific timelines. But honestly, I did not use any of that on Friendica, mainly for performance reasons. So this is a non-issue for me personally.
- Following RSS feeds. This feature I will really miss. In Friendica I could direclty follow Feeds and interact with them from my timeline exactly like with ActivityPub Notes or Articles. I will have to use an external translation service or write my own for that (having written an ActivityPub related tool with tootgroup.py before.)
- Message formatting is somewhat less flexible but this post shows what is possible still. Sometimes I like to put images in between paragraphs but not having that is also not a big deal.
- Event Calendar. This is not a feature I expect Snac to support but I do use it on Friendica and will have to think about how to replace it.
What could be improved
I love that snac works without Javascript and cookies - that's exactly how I still build my webpages. But there is one usecase where a bit of one or the other would make life much easier - when using the Web-UI on mobile platforms.
I have already stated how great the mobile experience is when using the next.css stylesheet. The only downside is that I have to login with username/password again and again, every time the mobile browser is sent to sleep by Android.
Optionally enabling the use of a login cookie would make life much easier. Even better would be enabling Snac to be installed as a Progressive Web App, but I have to admit, I'm not sure how hard or feasible this would be.
Overall, I do not see many shortcomings with Snac. Obviously it offers less features than Friendica, but what it does, it does very well and at least in my view, the important stuff is exactly where it needs to be.
Conclusion
I am pretty impressed with snac. I'll be running my test server for a little bit longer but I do expect replace my Friendica install in the not too distant future.
Adding grunfink@comam.es because maybe you're interested. Please don't treat this as a feature-request or even critizism. It's mostly meant as info for people who have not tried snac yet.
