Social & federation
Cairn includes a full social layer:
- Follow other users and see their activities in your feed.
- Profiles with public/follower/private visibility.
- Kudos and comments on activities.
- Clubs with membership and moderation tools.
- Sharing via unguessable share links for individual activities.
Visibility
Every non-owner read goes through a single visibility choke-point. Owners see their own activities directly; everyone else sees only what your visibility settings project to them. This keeps private data private regardless of which endpoint is used.
ActivityPub federation (optional, beta)
Federation is currently beta: the protocol surface and remote-instance compatibility may still change between releases. Expect rough edges before enabling it on an instance you care about.
Enable CAIRN_FEDERATION_ENABLED to let your instance federate over
ActivityPub — follow and be followed across Cairn (and other compatible)
instances. It's off by default, and off means fully dormant: the home feed
does not surface remote activities the instance may have received earlier, the
web UI hides the "Federated" feed filter, and the public
GET /api/instance/features endpoint reports federation as disabled so clients
can hide it too. Flip the flag and restart to bring it all back.
For local testing between instances on private addresses, additionally set
CAIRN_FEDERATION_ALLOW_PRIVATE_HOSTS=true; leave it off in production.