- Cloudflare introduced Wildebeest, an open-source, easy-to-deploy ActivityPub and Mastodon-compatible server built entirely on top of Cloudflare’s Supercloud.
- At the core, Wildebeest is a Cloudflare Pages project running its code using Pages Functions, which provides a foundation for building and deploying applications and serving bundled assets.
- Wildebeest uses D1, Cloudflare’s first SQL database for the Workers platform built on top of SQLite.
Cloudflare announced the launch of Wildebeest, built entirely on top of Cloudflare’s Supercloud. Wildebeest is an open-source, easy-to-deploy ActivityPub and Mastodon-compatible server. It allows users to run their own spot in the Fediverse entirely on Cloudflare.
The Fediverse on Cloudflare
Cloudflare pinpointed that users who are interested in joining a Mastodon federated network can join an existing server or can run their self-hosted servers. Users who want to create a new community and attract other users over a common theme and usage rules can prioritize creating their own servers. Users who don’t want to trust third-party servers or abide by their policies or who want complete control over the data, personal information, content, and visibility can prefer creating their own servers.
The Mastodon GmbH non-profit organization provides a server implementation using Ruby, Node.js, PostgreSQL, and Redis. However, running the official server requires a lot of scripting and technical work and it can be challenging. Wildebeest allows users to deploy a Mastodon-compatible server on top of Cloudflare and connect it to the Fediverse easily, without the need to maintain or protect it from abuse or attacks, which will be taken care of automatically by Cloudflare. Wildebeest is not a managed service, instead, it is the users’ instance, data, and code running in Cloudflare’s cloud under the user’s account. It currently supports:
- ActivityPub, WebFinger, NodeInfo, WebPush, and Mastodon-compatible APIs. Wildebeest can connect to or receive connections from other Fediverse servers.
- Compatible with the most popular Mastodon web, desktop, and mobile clients. We also provide a simple read-only web interface to explore the timelines and user profiles.
- You can publish, edit, boost, or delete posts, sorry, toots. We support text, images, and (soon) video.
- Anyone can follow you; you can follow anyone.
- You can search for content.
- You can register one or multiple accounts under your instance. Authentication can be email-based on or using any Cloudflare Access compatible IdP, like GitHub or Google.
- You can edit your profile information, avatar, and header image.
At its core, Wildebeest is a Cloudflare Pages project running its code using Pages Functions. Cloudflare Pages provides a foundation for building and deploying applications and serving your bundled assets. Functions provide full access to the Workers ecosystem, enabling users to run any code. Wildebeest uses D1, Cloudflare’s first SQL database for the Workers platform built on top of SQLite, now open to everyone in alpha, to store and query data.