Hummingbard

Hummingbard is an experimental client for building decentralized communities on top of Matrix. See a live instance on hummingbard.com

What Works

• Register local and federated users
• Federated logins with existing Matrix accounts
• Join local and federated spaces
• Follow local and federated users
• Generic post editor (markdown)
• Quick posts, with images/attachments/links/youtube/etc
• Blog posts with slug/metadata
• Replies to posts
• Sharing posts on profiles and across spaces
• User feed
• Public feed
• Create local and federated spaces
• Different space types - community, gallery
• Customize spaces and user profiles with basic info, custom CSS
• Deeply nested spaces (/music/jazz/fusion)

What Doesn't Work

• Private spaces and user profiles
• Embedded chat in spaces
• Direct Messages
• Registration flows

Dendrite

Hummingbard relies on these features that are currently only implemented in Dendrite, or expected to be implemented soon:

• Spaces (MSC2946)
• Threading (MSC2836)

There is a temporary patch in our forked Dendrite for paginating threads. This should not be necessary once upstream Dendrite implements threads fully.

Install

To run Hummingbard, you'll need:

• Dendrite fork configured and running
• redis (for session storage)
• postgres (for various non-Matrix storage)
• goose for migrations

Steps:

1. Clone the repo
2. Copy config-sample.toml to config.toml, update with DB config etc.
3. Run make
4. Run migrations in db/migrations
5. Run npm run build in /ui/js
6. Pull a JSON dump for large matrix rooms with curl 'https://matrix-client.matrix.org:443/_matrix/client/r0/publicRooms?limit=500' > bigrooms.json (we avoid large rooms to help Dendrite not consume too much resources)
7. Run the binary ./bin/hummingbard

You may want to:

1. Put Hummingbard behind Nginx
2. Server static files via Nginx
3. Use a systemd unit if appropriate

License

The code is currenly licensed under AGPLv3. I may choose a more permissive license in the future.