November 2024 – February 2025

    Soapbox Progress Report: November 2024 – February 2025

    Launched Eclipse (Bluesky-Nostr bridge), created Knox bunker, moved to self-hosted infrastructure saving over $1,000/month.

    Bluesky Bridge

    In December we launched a bridge between Nostr and Bluesky at eclipse.pub. The bridge is hosted on a rack server in-house, because it simply would not be possible to support a bridge of this scale on cloud infrastructure.

    Source code

    Knox

    Knox is a Nostr bunker implementation with a command line interface. It invents a new .bunker binary format with NIP-49 encryption. Built to delegate login credentials for marketing accounts to the team without exposing the private key.

    Source code

    Soapbox UI Redesign

    Soapbox got a visual overhaul, making it look more modern and setting the groundwork for important new features. Large portions of the codebase were modernized and dependencies optimized to shrink the bundle size.

    Ditto Updates

    • Performance Improvements — A custom rate-limiter was developed from scratch, and database fixes increased feed loading speed significantly.
    • Advanced Search — Ditto's search now supports attributes like video:true and protocol:activitypub. Filters can be combined for advanced search.
    • Compatibility with Olas — Now supports displaying kind 20 "Picture" events.
    • Custom Profile Fields — Mastodon-style user-defined custom fields.
    • JSON Logging — New JSON logging framework (Logi) for consistent, queryable log output.

    Ditching the Cloud

    Nearly all public internet servers were moved off the cloud and onto a server rack in-house. This improved performance and saved over $1,000/month. The setup includes uplinks from 2 ISPs, backup batteries, and comprehensive monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana dashboards.