Gab Social

Gab Social is an open source and fully decentralized social network powered by the Gab Platform. It is the new social network of Gab.com. This change was made to further Gab's committment to it's users trust and privacy online. And, by offering decentralization and federation, Gab further demonstrates a lack of interest in the ownership of your data.

The Gab Social project is based on the Mastodon project, and is licensed under the terms and conditions of AGPL-3.0. While we will be keeping this license, over time we will be keeping less and less of the original project's source code and approach.

Our goal is to establish the foundation of a federated network of social networks. Our first step is our move to this technology, which immediately enables the construction of that network and provides the tools people will need to create and build. Over time, a new implementation of this system will emerge that is entirely based on Node.js, moves away from Postgres as it's database, and becomes part of the HYDRA family.

Project goals

We have diverged from Mastodon in several ways in pursuit of our own goals.

1. Node.js has been updated to 10.15.3LTS for hosting the Streaming API in compliance with the Gab Platform.
2. Statuses were renamed from 'toots' to 'gabs'
3. The maximum length of a status was increased to 3,000 characters
4. The browser client user experience has been significantly altered to match what users of Gab will expect
5. Features were added to integrate the system with the Gab platform (accessing trends from Dissenter, for example)
6. Groups and group moderation
7. Quote posting

BTCPay

In order to make BTC flow work, 3 environment variables need to be set:

• BTCPAY_LEGACY_TOKEN: So called Legacy Tokens can be found in https://btcpay.[yourdomain].com/stores/[yourstore]/Tokens
• BTCPAY_PUB_KEY: Public key that is used when creating an access token or pairing https://btcpay.[yourdomain].com/stores/[yourstore]/Tokens/Create
• BTCPAY_MERCHANT_TOKEN: Token created for facade merchant

Deployment

Tech stack:

• Ruby on Rails powers the REST API and other web pages
• React.js and Redux are used for the dynamic parts of the interface
• Node.js powers the streaming API

Requirements:

• PostgreSQL 9.5+
• Redis
• Ruby 2.4+
• Node.js 8+

The repository includes deployment configurations for Docker and docker-compose, but also a few specific platforms like Heroku, Scalingo, and Nanobox.

A stand-alone installation guide will be provided as soon as possible.

Local development

To get started developing on Gab, you will need to run a version of it locally. The following instructions assume you are already familiar with using a terminal program.

1. Install Vagrant and VirtualBox if you haven't already.
2. Clone this repository with git clone https://code.gab.com/gab/social/gab-social.git
3. Change into the project directory with cd gab-social
4. Run vagrant up to provision the virtual machine. This will take a while.
5. Finally, run vagrant ssh -c "cd /vagrant && foreman start" to start the local web server.
6. Visit http://0.0.0.0:3000 in your web browser to see Gab's splash screen. If it doesn't load, or styling is missing, wait another minute and refresh the page.
7. Log in with the username admin and password administrator
8. Have fun developing on Gab!

License

Copyright (C) 2019 Gab AI, Inc., and other contributors (see AUTHORS.md, forked)

Copyright (C) 2016-2019 Eugen Rochko & other Gab Social contributors

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.