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Rivus

An application for receiving taking incoming Feeds (Atom, JSON, RSS, Social) into your own stream. An application for publishing outgoing Social on your own domain using ActivityPub.

Using: [PHP], libsodium and ActivityPub

Subscribing

The first use-case for Rivus, when I was just building internally was to consume streams. Most of my time is spent lurking on various sites: Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, etc. I like to be aware of whats happening and it's a great way to get all the headlines -- and (had historically) been trival to click-into any of them for more detail/discussion.

Normal/standard Atom, RSS or JSONFeed streams are simple to add: just add the link to your subscription.

Authenticated services are slightly more complicated. A feature of running your own instance of Rivus is that you are in control of the stream. A consequence of this is that you must use your own credintials when consuming those streams.

See the README for Facebook, LinkedIn and Reddit

Publishing

For the case of publishing, Rivus believes in control for the author. So, you'd simply create a post in Rivus of the proper type. Your Rivus instance will publish the post, and generate Atom, RSS and JSONFeed formatted documents. Rivus will also publish via ActivityPub which is a distributed/federated social-media protocol.

Technology Stack

Rivus is designed to be very low-maintenance and we've tried to keep the dependency count very low.

PHP

Rivus should run just fine on PHP 7 or 8.

libsodium

For some of the encryption work we're depending on libsodium. It's bundeled in with most PHP distributsions.

ActivityPub

Follow Someone:

curl https://mastodon.social/@edoceo # and look for <link> or <script> for activity pub.
curl --header 'Accept: application/json' 'https://mastodon.social/@openthc'  | jq
curl --header 'Accept: application/json' https://mastodon.social/users/edoceo

Creating a Site

To get the Rivus code to host a site you'll need to create the directory in ./var. We intentionally don't make the path automatically because then the system get's littered with new paths from all kinds of drive-by HTTP noise. Better to serve them a 501 or 404 type resonse.

install --directory --mode=0755 --owner=www-data --group=www-data var/$SERVER_NAME

Posting Publicly

Just write something.

Sending Anon/Encrypted Message to Recipient

Encrypt a message to the Public Key; but not from any specific Source Key

// Source
$message_crypt = sodium_crypto_box_seal($message_plain, $target_public_key);
// Target
$message_plain = sodium_crypto_box_seal_open($message_crypt, $target_key_pair);

Sending Verified Encrypted Message to Recipient

// Source
$crypt = rivus_box($plain, $source_sk, $target_pk)
// Target
$plain = rivus_box_open($crypt, $target_sk)