Tag Archives: Decentralized Web

What Is the Fediverse?

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The word Fediverse comes from the joining of the words “Federated” and “Universe”. It encompasses web-based social software that is inter-operable through open protocols1 and gives each person full control over their own website and data.

(of a country or organization) set up as a single centralized unit within which each state or division keeps some internal autonomy.

federated, from Oxford living Dictionaries

Where are we now?

Modern social technology, for the most part, revolves around huge central areas of power. Places like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Google have become household names. But these sorts of companies are not conducive to a free and open world.

These central powers monopolise much of the communication between people and fully own and control the data that they collect from said communications.

Not only do they own that data, but it is their core business models to learn as much as possible about us and monetise that data for their actual customers – their investors2.

Not only is this dangerous to a free and open world, and along with it freedom of speech, but it also strips people of their control over a huge portion of what it means to be a human being on the planet Earth today – their personal data.

Data about people, is people.

Aral Balkan, Cyborg Rights Activist

Huge leaps in the right direction

The Fediverse tips the current digital social system on its head, by enabling people to take back ownership over their digital selves. With certain services that are available, you3 have the ability to choose alternatives to mainstream technology – you have the ability to take back control, as these federated services have decentralisation built into their core.

This decentralisation removes the giant centres we’re used to seeing, leveling the playing field and giving each person an equal place from which to speak.

Yes, you would need to set up your own installation, or have somebody with the know-how you trust do it for you. But once you have that freedom with your very own digital home – that you truly own and control – it’s very liberating.

Let’s use a service called “Mastodon” as an example here. Mastodon is often described as being a federated Twitter, which it is, but I think it’s important to really hammer home what that actually means. And the principles I will describe here apply to many other types of federated social sites. For example: Peertube – a federated youtube contender; and Pixelfed – a federated Instagram clone.

It’s also worth saying that when we say something is a federated version of a current site, that current site has zero to do with them – it is just a way for people to grasp what the given federated site offers by way of general features.

Mastodon, for example

Mastodon is not just a single website. It is an open source project that can power anybody’s website.

Me trying to explain mastodon in a single line.

If I have my own installation of Mastodon (each installation is known as an Instance, by the way), then I have my very own Twitter-like website where I can share my thoughts and images with anybody who would care to read them. And if you had your own instance of it, you could do the same.

For example, if:

We would be at completely different web addresses. However, we would still be able to communicate with one another, thanks to the way that mastodon works. (In comparision, everyone who uses Twitter goes through https://twitter.com. So talking to one another there takes place in Twitter’s house, as it were). With federation, the communication is done so between the people involved; from their own homes.

What makes the Fediverse federated, is its ability to enable people to have their own self-controlled instance of a service and still be able to connect with other people as we have come to love4 about Twitter et al. And imagine that, but with thousands and thousands of instances – all able to talk to one another.

It’s going to be a long hard road out of our current situation, but it all starts here – in the Fediverse.

And it doesn’t stop there.

Cross-service communication

A big tennet of federated services, is that there are no lock-ins to any particular one.

Earlier on I mentioned some other federated services – Peertube (for video sharing) and Pixelfed (a federated version of Instagram). Let’s suppose that I have a friend who has an instance of Peertube, where they share video reviews on, let’s say the Australian soap “Neighbours”. And let’s suppose I wanted to get updates from that friend, but I only have my own Mastodon site. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could follow his Peertube site, but from my Mastodon?

You already know what’s coming doing you? 😀

You can!

For example, I can follow a content creator from their own instance of Peertube, and have their messages come through in my mastodon feed. This is the exact opposite of how we are currently used to seeing online services. The big social networks have lock-ins to their own walled gardens – the Fediverse is a huge open park where people can choose to travel through it any way they wish.

The beauty, and extra special powers, of the fediverse is that it isn’t limited to a single service. The underlying protocols (ways that the sites communicate) are designed in such a way that they can be used by any service that wishes to implement them. And those messages still go from person to person – there is no central authority to trust and / or fear.

Joining the Fediverse

Right now, it is hard for none-tech people to get up and running with their very own instance of a chosen service. This is the fediverse’s biggest hurdle right now in my opinion, but it is still early days and hopefully things will get easier with time.

That being said, there are numerous community-driven instances of services that allow you to register on. This does go against that idea of self-control and ownership that I have been talking about somewhat. However, we all have to start somewhere and joining a popular community instance is a great way to try it out and even discover new friends. Plus, once you are comfortable in the Fediverse, there is nothing stopping you from starting your own instance later on down the road, should you have the technical knowledge or someone to help you do so.

If you would like advice, I’d be happy to help where I can. Email me at mail@davidpeach.me.

I hope you, after reading this, will give the fediverse a try for yourself. This is freedom of speech at its best on the web right now, and I encourage you to give it a go for yourself. And if / when you do, come and say hello: https://mastodon.davidpeach.me

In Closing

The fediverse is an agreement that the people who use social services online, indeed the entire web, should be in full control and ownership of 100% of their data. They should be free to be who they want to be, without being beholden to huge conglomerates whose only bar for success is profit for renting access to peoples private data.

Come on over and say hello.

Setting up my own Nextcloud (Version 16)

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Setting up your very own Nextcloud server from scratch. This has been tested with version 15 and 16 of the software. Any questions, please do contact me.

Updated on: 24th June 2019

Set up a new server (with Digital Ocean)

If you don’t have an account already, head to Digital Ocean and create a new account. Of course, you can use any provider that you want to – I just happen to use them and so can only give experience from that.

Login to your account.

Setup your SSH key

In the next step we will be creating your new droplet (server), and you will need an SSH Key to add to it. This allows for easy and secure access to your new droplet from your local computer, via your terminal1.

If you are going to use the Digital Ocean console terminal, skip down to ‘Create the new “Droplet”‘, as you wont need an ssh key.

Creating the key (if you haven’t already)

If you haven’t generated an SSH key pair before, open a fresh terminal window and enter the following:

ssh-keygen -t rsa

Press enter through all of the defaults to complete the creation.

Getting the contents of the public key

Type this to display your new public key:

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

This will give you a long string of text starting with ssh-rsa and ending with something like yourname@your-computer.

Highlight the whole selection, including the start and end points mentioned, and right click and copy.

When you are creating your droplet below, you can select the New SSH Key button and paste your public key into the box it gives you. You will also need to give the key a name when you add it in Digital Ocean, but you can name it anything.

Then click the Add SSH Key and you’re done.

Create the new “Droplet”

Digital Ocean refers to each server as a droplet, going with the whole digital “ocean” theme.

Head to Create > Droplets and click the “One-click apps” tab. Then choose the following options in the selection (Or your own custom selection – just take into account the monthly cost of each option):

  • LAMP on 18.04
  • $15/Month (2GB / 60GB / 3TB Transfer)
  • Enable backups (not necessary but recommended)
  • London (Choose your closest / preferred location)
  • Add your SSH key (see above)
  • Optionally rename the hostname to something more readable

Once you have selected the above (or your own custom options) click create. After a few moments, your droplet will be ready to use.

Set your DNS

Got to your domain name provider, Hover in my case, and set up the subdomain for your nextcloud installation, using the I.P. address for your new droplet.

I’m assuming that you already have your own domain name, perhaps for your personal website / blog. In which case we are adding a subdomain to that (so https://nextcloud.yourdomain.co.uk, for example).

But there is nothing stopping you from buying a fresh domain and using it exclusively for your new Nextcloud (https://my-awesome-nextcloud.co.uk).

I will be continuing this guide, assuming that you are using a subdomain.

You will add it in the form of an A record. This is how I would add it in Hover:

  1. Select your own domain
  2. Choose edit > edit DNS
  3. Click Add A record on the DNS edit page
  4. Fill in the hostname as your desired subdomain for your Nextcloud. For example if you were having nextcloud.mydomain.co.uk, you would just enter nextcloud.
  5. Fill in the I.P. address as the I.P. address of your new Droplet in Digital Ocean.
  6. Click Add Record

Configuring the server

Install all the required programs for Nextcloud

First ssh into your new server:

ssh root@YOUR.IP.ADDRESS.HERE

When we chose to install the LAMP option when setting up the droplet, it installed Linux, Apache2, MySQL and PHP. However, there are still some extra dependencies that Nextcloud needs to run.
Let’s install those next:

apt-get update

apt-get install libapache2-mod-php7.2 php7.2-gd php7.2-json &&
apt-get install php7.2-mysql php7.2-curl php7.2-mbstring &&
apt-get install php7.2-common php7.2-intl php-imagick php7.2-xml &&
apt-get install php7.2-zip php7.2-ldap php7.2-imap  php7.2-gmp &&
apt-get install php7.2-apcu php7.2-redis php7.2-imagick ffmpeg unzip

Download and install the Nextcloud codebase

Please note that I am using version 15.0.0 in this example. However, when you read this you may have a new version available to you. I will try and keep this guide as up to date as possible.

# Download the codebase and the "checksum" file.
wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/nextcloud-15.0.0.zip
wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/nextcloud-15.0.0.zip.sha256

# Make sure that the codebase is genuine and hasn't been altered.
sha256sum  -c nextcloud-15.0.0.zip.sha256 < nextcloud-15.0.0.zip

# Move the unzipped codebase into the webserver directory.
unzip nextcloud-15.0.0.zip
cp -r nextcloud /var/www
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/nextcloud

Apache config example

nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf

An example apache config:

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerAdmin mail@yourdomain.co.uk
        DocumentRoot /var/www/nextcloud

        <Directory /var/www/nextcloud/>
            Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
            AllowOverride All
            Require all granted
        </Directory>

        ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
        CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

        <IfModule mod_dir.c>
            DirectoryIndex index.php index.pl index.cgi index.html index.xhtml index.htm
        </IfModule>

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} =nextcloud.yourdomain.co.uk
RewriteRule ^ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [END,NE,R=permanent]
</VirtualHost>
a2enmod rewrite && a2enmod headers && a2enmod env && 
a2enmod dir && a2enmod mime && systemctl restart apache2

A quick mysql fix

In recent versions of MySQL, the way that the mysql root user connects to the database means that password authentication wont work. So firstly we need to alter that user to use password authentication.

apt install mysql-server
mysql

# In the mysql mode
ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'your_secret_password';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
quit

SSL with Let’s Encrypt

apt install certbot
certbot --apache -d nextcloud.yourdomain.co.uk

You will then be asked some questions about your installation:

  • Email address (your… umm… email address :D)
  • Whether you agree to Lets Encrypt Terms of Service (Agree)
  • Whether to redirect HTTP traffic to HTTPS (choose Yes)

Let’s Encrypt will handle the registering of the apache settings for you new ssl to work. It uses the server name you entered in the 000-default.conf file earlier.

It will also create a new file that is used by Apache for the SSL. For me, this file was at /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default-le-ssl.conf.

First Login!

Now go to https://nextcloud.yourdomain.co.uk and you should see your nice new shiny Nextcloud installation.

Creating the admin account

Fill in the fields for your desired name and password for the admin account. You can just use the admin account as your main account if you will be the only one using this Nextcloud. But you can give others access to this site with their own login details, if you wanted. But without the admin-level priviledges.

For the database fields, enter root as the username. Then for the password, use the one that you set in the previous mysql command above. For the database name choose whatever name you wish, as the installation will create it for you.

Click finish.

After a few moments time, your nextcloud instance should present you with the landing screen along with the welcome popup. Go ahead and read it and you could even install the app for your devices as it will suggest.

Finishing touches

If you click the cog icon in the top right of your screen, followed by settings in its dropdown, you will come to the main settings area. In the left-hand column, beneath the heading “Administration”, you should see the link for “Overview”. Click it.

Now you should see a bunch of security and setup warnings at the top of the page. This is nothing to worry about, it is simply telling you about some actions that are highly recommended to setup.

We will do that now. 🙂

The “Strict-Transport-Security” HTTP header is not set to at least “15552000” seconds. For enhanced security, it is recommended to enable HSTS as described in the security tips.

All that is needed to fix this first one, is a quick edit to the apache config file that Let’s Encrypt created for the installation.

nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default-le-ssl.conf

And then add this following three lines within the <VirtualHost *:443> tag.

<IfModule mod_headers.c>
    Header always add Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=15768000; includeSubDomains; preload"
</IfModule>

And then reload apache:

systemctl reload apache2

Refreshing the settings page should see that warning disappear.

No memory cache has been configured. To enhance performance, please configure a memcache, if available.

Open up you Nextcloud config file:

nano /var/www/nextcloud/config/config.php

At the bottom of the config array, add the following line:

'memcache.local' => '\OC\Memcache\APCu',

Refresh your browser and that next warning should now vanish.

For future reference, you can always take a look in the sample Nextcloud config file at /var/www/nextcloud/config/config.sample.php. It will show you all available config options.

The PHP OPcache is not properly configured.

With this warning, Nextcloud should display some sample opcache code to paste over. This one caught me out as I couldn’t work out which ini file this example code should go.

After some trial and error, I discovered that for me, it was located in an opcache.ini file:

nano /etc/php/7.2/mods-available/opcache.ini

Then at the bottom of the file, I pasted the following:

opcache.enable=1
opcache.enable_cli=1
opcache.interned_strings_buffer=8
opcache.max_accelerated_files=10000
opcache.memory_consumption=128
opcache.save_comments=1
opcache.revalidate_freq=1

Reload apache:

systemctl reload apache2

Some columns in the database are missing a conversion to big int.

I only actually came across this warning when I was creating a dummy Nextcloud installation for helping with writing this guide. You may not actually get it. But if you do, here’s the fix2:

sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ db:convert-filecache-bigint

This will warn you that it could take hours to do its thing, depending on the number of files. However, due to us running it right after the installation, will not even take a second.

The PHP memory limit is below the recommended value of 512MB

To fix this, I just had to edit the following file:

nano /etc/php/7.2/apache2/php.ini

Then alter the next line to look like this:

memory_limit = 512M

Then restart apache:

service apache2 restart

All Done

Once you refresh the settings page once more, you should see a beautiful green tick with the message “All checks passed”.

Good feeling, isn’t it?

If for any reason you are still getting warnings, please dont hesitate to contact me. I’ll do my best to help. Email: mail@davidpeach.me. Alternatively you can head to the Nextcloud Documentation.