Outmo.de

Fediverse Akkoma instance

About us

https://outmo.de is a general purpose Fediverse instance running the ActivityPub (Mastodon etc.) compatible Akkoma software.

It was started in early 2023, to provide an instance to the admins of https://f-hub.org but can be used by anyone willing to adhere to the rules and terms of service.

Currently registrations are open but require admin approval.

A secondary purpose it to test out the F-hub.org hosted services setup and experiment with XMPP integration for Fediverse instances.

Additional features

Our Akkoma instance has an machine-translation feature utilizing a LibreTranslate instance on our own servers, so no data is shared with 3rd party services. It works quite well with most European languages and a few others.

Todo: We plan to run our own Meilisearch indexing software for improved local search of posts and hashtags. 

ActivityPub Federation

Sometimes ActivityPub federation is not quite working as expected by many people. This is mainly because an Fediverse instance can only know about posts and other instances it previously interacted with. As a result not all replies are always immediately visible and polls might not reflect the full results as visible on the original instance.

Here is a nice flowchat that illustrates the issue:

ea553384702dc81e.png

Source: Casolotl

Often it helps to paste the original url of a post or reply into the search bar.

Mobile Apps

While our Akkoma software supports a wide range of ActivityPub apps via the Mastodon API, some of the additional features work best with the following mobile apps:

You can also install our local Phanpy instance as a PWA or use it in a browser.

If you come across another app that works well with Akkoma, please let us know.

XMPP account

When registering on Outmo.de you automatically get an XMPP (aka Jabber) account on the same user ID.

So if your Fediverse ID is mrfancypants@outmo.de you can also be reached via the XMPP federation on the same JID.

Learn more about XMPP on Joinjabber.org.

Our server runs the latest version of Ejabberd and you can check the health status here.

You can use the F-hub.org XMPP invite page to share your contact and invite other XMPP users to chat rooms.

Apps

We currently recommend the following mobile apps for XMPP:

On desktop PCs use either Gajim or Dino.

Note for iOS/MacOS users:

If you are trying to use Monal with our XMPP service you will likely encounter a scary warning about MITM-prone PLAIN auth. This is due to the way our XMPP server needs to validate your password against the Lemmy database and sadly can not be changed.

But you can go to the advanced connection settings and enable the "Allow MITM-prone PLAIN auth..." setting and then it should work. In case that still fails, try removing the account from Monal completely and start again.

Upcoming features

There is still some work to do to enable video calls on our Ejabberd XMPP server. Hopefully we will be able to enable it by the time Monal has full support for it as well.

We will also support using XMPP as a UnifiedPush distributor.

We will also try to integrate a XMPP web-client into our Akkoma frontend.

There is also a plan to enable some Slidge gateways to other chat services like Telegram or Signal.

WebDAV storage

When you register an account on Outmo.de, you will automatically also get access to a small WebDAV and Nextcloud compatible cloud storage. Please note that this is only a file-storage and we do not plan to add CalDAV or CardDAV.

For now we limit the storage space to 100mb to prevent people from using our servers as a photo back-up location.

The small space it however still very useful for syncing notes and bookmarks between devices and storing smaller files for sharing them online. We can manually increase this space upon request, but will likely only do so for contributors (see below).

We use Karadav for providing this WebDAV storage. It comes with a basic but fully functional web-interface that you can access on:

https://webdav.outmo.de

This address can also be used in many WebDAV compatible apps, although sometimes they will require adding the full path like this: https://webdav.outmo.de/files/yourusername

Tested apps: Floccus, Orgzly, Nextcloud and many more.

Known issues:  external JS WebDAV clients with CORS problems.

Filestash file browser

The built in file explorer of KaraDAV is rather barebones, thus we added a much nicer Filestash UI that you can access on https://files.outmo.de. There you can preview images, edit text files (with Org-mode support) and also share them with others not registered on Outmo.de.

ONLYOFFICE editor suite integration

We are currently working on adding an ONLYOFFICE editor suite integration to our WebDAV offer. The easiest will be to access it through the Filestash web-interface, but WOPI integration is also supported by KaraDAV.

Increasing storage space

We plan to offer the option to increase the storage space to 1GB for monthly contributors soon. Higher amounts are also possible, but we need to evaluate upgrading the total bandwidth of our server connection first.