Commune

Commune lets you build free and open public communities on a Matrix server. It transforms a Matrix server into a publicly accessible community platform. The goal is to make it easy for existing homeserver operators to open up their Matrix instance (or a subset of it) to the web, and add extra community features using native Matrix functionality.

Conceptual Introduction: Communal Bonfires.

We're operating these live instances at the moment:

• commune.sh

What does it do?

Commune opens up all spaces and underlying rooms to the web by reading data directly from the Synapse DB, bypassing Synapse's client-server API. Additional features such as discussion boards, threaded comments are rendered by the client. Commune makes use of many materialized views for querying Synapse events.

Short-term roadmap

• [x] Federation between Commune instances
• [ ] Social login support
• [ ] ActivityPub support for interacting with the fediverse
• [ ] Private spaces/boards and Encrypted DMs
• [ ] Simplify self-hosting deployment

How to run

Requirements

• Synapse
• Redis
• S3-compatible object storage (optional)
• Email/SMTP provider (optional)

You'll need to set up a matrix/synapse server. Existing servers can be used too, but Commune is highly experimental at the moment, so it's best to set up a new homeserver.

1. Clone this repo
2. Run make deps to fetch dependencies.
3. Copy config-sample.toml to config.toml. Update the config with your Synapse details.
4. Run make to build the app.
5. Run the db/matrix/views/creates.sh script to create materialized views.
6. Run modd to run app locally while developing.
7. To deploy, put the app behind nginx.

Finally, you'll need to go install the client and point it to your Commune backend.

Get in touch

Find us on #commune:commune.sh or on #commune:matrix.org.

WARNING

Commune is operating in world_readable mode. This means that everything on your matrix server has the potential to be accessible from the web. No work has been put into private spaces/rooms or encryption. Unless explicitly stated, assume that every event on a Commune-based matrix server will be public.