A gentle introduction to Cawfee Club
Welcome! Somehow, you've made it to Cawfee Club and the site is probably confusing you a bit. In this article, we'll try to shed some light on the site and the basic concepts behind it.
Cawfee Club is a small social network without any ads, monetization or third-party tracking - forever. The site is running on a piece of software called Pleroma. Pleroma offers a sleek, modern single-page interface inspired by older versions of Twitter and other sites. We're forever grateful to the Pleroma development team for making all this possible.
Federation
Cawfee Club may not be large by itself (about a few dozens of weekly posters), but it's a part of a way larger network comprising millions of users and thousands of servers in total. This is possible through a set of open source network protocols like ActivityPub. The servers can freely exchange posts, reactions to them and other data, enabling seamless interactions between users on different servers. This mechanism is called federation. Thus, the entire network of servers is often broadly referred to as the Fediverse (what a stupid name, wow).
The individual fediverse servers are often called instances and all the instances are different in the underlying software, visual presentation, their userbases etc. Cawfee Club, for example, has a larger-than-normal share of anime fans, Christians and right wingers, though everyone willing to follow the rules is welcome!
Apps
Any app designed for the Fediverse should work with Cawfee Club. There's now plenty of such apps, although the subset of supported Pleroma features might vary.
For Android, we recommend Husky. (Google Play, F-Droid)
For more info about Pleroma and the Fediverse, check out these wonderful resources:
- Pleroma-FE user guide - how to navigate the UI (docs-develop.pleroma.social)
- Welcome to Cawfee Club - old, but might be useful (cawfee.club)
- What Is Pleroma? (blog.soykaf.com)
- The Big Pleroma and Fediverse FAQ Part 1 - Beginner Questions (pleroma.social)
See you there!
