I had the idea to configure a place where people could share news about our part of town.

My objective has been to connect this to the fediverse, but also make it possible as a webpage.

I'm hosting my stuff on a small computer running #yunohost on a home internet line and do neither have a lot of CPU/RAM nor bandwith.

target specification

• have one place to follow messages written by different people
• offer these messages on the fediverse to follow and on a web page
• make use of existing fediverse application to write messages
• be able to offer accounts to authors who are not yet on the fediverse
• host my own fediverse account for notes in German
• runs with little ressources

fediverse server

After looking around I opted for #GoToSocial. It works with very little CPU and RAM and is available for #yunohost.

• The community is lively and there is ongoing development.
• It's got one of the best documentations I've ever seen so far for free, libre open source software.
• The software seems to work stable even though it is still in an alpha development stage.
• Sometimes less is more: there is no landing page in GoToSocial showing a timeline, but there is a configuration setting to show an accounts profile as the landing page.

I created an account to be used by the authors who might want to write news and put some information on the profile.

sharing credentials?

Having one account for hopefully multiple future authors writing on it sound like sharing credentials.

I didn't need to, because while looking for some software to boost notes by some helpful criteria I stumbled over tootgroup.py.

tootgroup.py

…offers exactly what I've been looking for without knowing it in advance.

Once registered as an app and given a token for an account it is called in intervalls (e.g. by cron) and

• looks through the notifications of its account
• for new incoming DMs or notes it checks if its account is following the actor who created them
• if the actor is followed (and thereby a member of the team) it takes the content of the DM and toots it under its own account
• if the content is not a DM it looks for the string !@my_account at the notes beginning and if it finds it removes it and toots the rest of the content

Perfect. The team account follows all team members (no matter whether local or remote) and re-toots whatever is meant to be re-tooted.

tootgroup.py is designed for Mastodon and didn't work from initially with GoToSocial. But with some help I could adopt it to work.

You can find the version I use in my fork as branch GoToSocial.

result and bonus

A simple solution running with very little ressources usage that does exactly what I've been looking for.

As a bonus the timeline of the team account can be made available as RSS by switching the feature on in the accounts settings.

The editorial team is simply the list of accounts the team account follows.

https://hallo.ween.de/ (German)