1
  2Instructions for using honk.
  3
  4This is the user manual. Please refer to admin.txt for administration.
  5
  6-- posting
  7
  8Should work as expected.
  9
 10Limited markdown support:
 11	**bold** and *italics*
 12	`code` and ```code block```
 13	> quote
 14
 15Large images are rescaled and reduced.
 16
 17The honk back button will prefill the forms for replies.
 18
 19-- sensitive honks
 20
 21A honk that begins with the danger zone indication, DZ:, will be marked
 22sensitive, using the first line as a summary (spoiler text).
 23
 24-- following
 25
 26In order to follow somebody, you need to enter one of two identifiers.
 27
 28The easiest is probably their handle, the thing that resembles an email.
 29@name@example.com for example.
 30
 31Alternatively, one may directly enter the actor ID, which is a URL that looks
 32like https://example.com/users/name.
 33
 34Followed honkers may be assigned to combos, listing all their honks together.
 35
 36Followed honkers will appear on the main feedtube unless silenced. Honkers may
 37be silenced by adding them to a combo named "-". (One dash.)
 38
 39Selecting just peeping won't actually follow them. (Incomplete feature.)
 40Can be useful for managing as part of a combo, however.
 41
 42-- xzone
 43
 44Individual honks may be manually fetched via the xzone.
 45
 46Additionally, entering a honker URL will fetch all their recent honks.
 47
 48A list of recently known honkers will appear as well.
 49
 50-- zonking
 51
 52You can zonk anything you like (or dislike), either your own honk or
 53those of others that you're tired of seeing. Be advised that deletion
 54works poorly in a federated environment. It's more like please disregard.
 55
 56-- privacy
 57
 58Posted honks are public. The federated environment lacks robust privacy
 59controls.
 60
 61Received messages are only visible when logged in, regardless of addressing.
 62Content from outside is not publicly rehosted, unless bonked.
 63
 64Received messages that are less than public are tagged with a red border.
 65As a special exception to the public honking rule, replies to limited messages
 66will be restricted as much as possible. Note that ActivityPub leaks. Do
 67not use honk for posting truly private information.
 68
 69-- emus and memes
 70
 71A list of available emus and memes appears in the funzone.
 72
 73Emus such as :example: will be inlined into posts.
 74
 75Memes such as `meme: example.mp4` will be appended to posts.
 76
 77-- hoots
 78
 79Link and inline a hoot and replies from that other bird site.
 80hoot: https://twitter.com/tedunangst/status/839169710675611658
 81
 82-- cleanup
 83
 84One should occasionally run `honk cleanup` to free up internal space in the
 85database. This deletes honks older than 30 days, but not those posted by a
 86user.
 87
 88One may also run `honk reduce [honker]` to delete honks older than 3 days.
 89This is useful to reduce the space requirements from following image bots.
 90
 91(Neither command runs vacuum, so the file size will not immediately shrink.)
 92
 93-- add user
 94
 95Running `honk adduser` can add additional users. This is discouraged.
 96
 97-- proxy
 98
 99honk requires a TLS terminating reverse proxy be configured. It communicates
100with other servers via https URLs.
101
102If the proxy is configured to support caching, be mindful of the fact that
103ActivityPub requests vary based on the Accept and Content-Type headers.
104
105ActivityPub in practice uses HTTP signatures to verify requests. In order for
106this to work, the backend server must receive certain header fields
107unmodified. In particular, the Host header and the message content cannot be
108altered.
109
110Specifically, for nginx: `proxy_set_header Host $http_host;`