Fediwall

Fediwall is a media wall application made for Mastodon. Follow hashtags or accounts and show the most recent posts in a self-updating, screen filling and visually pleasing masonry grid layout. Put it on a large screen and showcase community feedback or social media reactions while hosting your next big event, or use it to look at cat pictures all day. Your choice.

Features

• Follow hashtags or accounts on multiple servers and display all public posts (including boosts) matching your interest.
• Visually pleasing and screen filling masonry grid layout that scales well with all types of screens, from tablet to large screens or LED walls at venues.
• Dark mode for less eye stain and lower energy consumption.
• Find new posts quickly and watch them appear with a smooth animation. The update logic gracefully handles Mastodon server rate limits.
• Moderation tools allow you to pin important posts, hide inappropriate posts or block entire accounts if necessary.
• Configure everything to your liking without the need to host your own instance. Settings are stored in the URL, so you can bookmark or share your personalized wall with others.
• Self-host your own if you like. Fediwall is compiled to a static website with no server side logic. Just put it on a webserver and you are done.

Try it out

There is a public demo site you can start playing with.

Screenshot (dark/light theme)

How to build and host your own

Checkout this repository, run npm install once, then npm run build and copy the content of the ./dist/ folder to a web server of your choice. If you want to run Fediwall under a certain path instead of the web server root, specify the --base build option and all paths will be rewritten accordingly (e.g. npm run build -- --base=/wall/ to serve it as https://example.com/wall/).

Configuration

If you deploy Fediwall yourself, you can either change default settings in ./src/defaults.ts, or upload a custom wall-config.json file to the Fediwall folder on your webserver. Fediwall will check for that file during initialization and use it as its default configuration.

All config values can also be defined or changed via URL query parameters. The easiest way to generate a custom URL is to use the built-in config editor. Go to the Fediwall instance you want to use, scroll down, click [configure] and change everything to your liking, then hit Apply. Bookmark or share the new URL.

Development

Checkout this repository, run npm install once, then npm run dev and start coding.

F.A.Q.

Some posts do not show up. Why?

This can have multiple reasons:

• Fediwall can only find posts that are known to the configured source instances. If you post on a different instance, make sure someone from a source instance follows you or boosts your post.
• Fediwall by default only shows public posts and hides replies, sensitive content or anything with limited visibility. Posts from suspended or limited accounts are also filtered out.
• If all posts from a specific instance are missing, the instance may be down, unresponsive, defederated, or deliberately block anonymous API access.

It's called Fediwall, but only supports Mastodon. What about X?

Fediwall currently relies on a small subset of the Mastodon v1 API to fetch content, which is also implemented by many Mastodon alternatives. Support for other source APIs (e.g. Pixelfed) is planned, but this may take a while. Pull requests are welcomed, though!

Direct API access is not always necessary. Federated content shows up on Fediwall no matter on which server or platform they were originally posted.

I want to use Fediwall for my next big event. How do I prevent spam or inappropriate content?

Choose a server with active moderation to reduce the risk of troll-, spam-, or nsfw-posts showing up. If you see something you do not want, you can manually hide individual posts or entire account in the UI.

To play it save, stop following hashtags and follow a bunch of trusted event accounts instead. Those accounts would then manually boost posts and only allow approved content to show up on the wall.

Special thanks

This project was inspired by Mastowall, check it out too!

License

Copyright (C) 2023  Marcel Hellkamp
Copyright (C) 2023  Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen

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/>.