News

Run Klonkt on your phone — the Android app (alpha)

Here's something a little wild: you can now run a complete Klonkt server on your Android phone. Not a companion app — the actual site, hosted from your pocket. Install one app, wait a minute or two, and your Klonkt is live with its own public web address.

It sets everything up by itself and gives your site a free, secure address through Cloudflare — which means it works over both Wi-Fi and mobile data, no home router or port-forwarding needed. Want it on your own domain? That takes one line. See it in action on a phone that's serving right now: android.sound-fabrics.com.

Under the hood it runs on Termux, the well-known open-source Android terminal — the app is a version of Termux with Klonkt built in, and it's fully open source too.

It's an early alpha, so expect the occasional rough edge — a phone isn't a round-the-clock server, and it may go offline now and then. But it's a lovely way to try Klonkt, run a demo, or simply say your music literally runs on your phone. Grab it and read the guide at klonkt.com/android.

Klonkt 1.3 — polls, better conversations, and music that keeps playing

This is a big one. You can now ask your audience questions with polls: add one to a post and anyone on the fediverse — Mastodon included — can vote, while you watch the results come in. Mentions got real too: @-mention someone in a post and they actually get notified, and when people reply to your posts elsewhere on the fediverse, those conversations now show up under your post more completely.

Music lovers get the best fix of the round: listening on your phone no longer stops between songs. Previously, when a track ended while your screen was locked, the next one would start and immediately pause. The player now plays your whole queue as one continuous stream, so it just keeps going. Your tracks also show their cover art when they travel across the fediverse.

Also new: descriptions for images (alt text) so screen readers can describe your photos, a language setting per post, a way to report content to another server's moderators, and a light-or-dark choice for the preview card people see when your site is shared.

Self-hosting Klonkt? Update as usual — run klonkt-update, or use the Updates page in your admin panel. Version 1.3.1 includes the music fix; nothing extra to do.

Klonkt 1.2.0 — smoother videos and a few nice touches

A round of polish and small features. PeerTube videos now play right inside your feed, just like YouTube, Spotify and SoundCloud already did. If your site uses a light theme, the preview image people see when they share your page now matches it, instead of always being dark. And as the owner you can leave your own visits out of your statistics, so the numbers reflect your real visitors.

Animated video covers also got a fix — they were sometimes showing up blank or cropped in the grid, and now they fill the tile neatly and play as intended. Behind the scenes, following people and keeping your Circle in sync with the wider fediverse got more reliable too.

Self-hosting Klonkt? Just update as usual — run klonkt-update, or use the Updates page in your admin panel. Nothing extra to do.

Animated covers — and they play smoothly everywhere

Your cover image can now move. Upload an animated WebP and Klonkt turns it into a smooth, silent loop — so it plays cleanly on the post, in the grid and in the feed, on every device including iPhones, where animated images often stutter. When your post reaches the wider fediverse, the cover travels along as a short video that plays in Mastodon and its apps too.

This is part of Klonkt 1.1.0, which also brings a tidy Media library in your admin — see where each image is used and clean up old files — and a handful of fixes for how posts and embeds look on Mastodon.

Self-hosting Klonkt? Just update as usual — run klonkt-update, or use the Updates page in your admin panel. There's nothing extra to do.

Klonkt now plays better with the rest of the fediverse 🎉

A nice milestone: Klonkt now speaks the fediverse's shared language more correctly, so it gets along better with Mastodon, WordPress, PeerTube, Hubzilla and other servers — not just one of them.

Boosts reach the original author. When you boost someone's post, their server now actually registers it and notifies them — exactly like a boost coming from Mastodon would. Before, a boost from Klonkt could quietly go unnoticed on some servers. Boosts are also sent reliably now: if the other server is briefly unreachable, we keep trying instead of giving up after a single attempt.

Your profile travels more completely. The links on your profile (your website and socials), the date you joined, and the accounts you follow now come along to other servers — so when someone views your Klonkt profile from Mastodon, it looks complete instead of bare.

Unfollowing actually sticks now, along with a handful of smaller rough edges — all to make Klonkt a well-behaved citizen of the wider network. And a small touch in Circles: if your circle has more than five sites, the count now opens a tidy popup showing everyone in it.

How we go about it. The fediverse wasn't invented by any single app. We build on the open standards its pioneers created — projects like GNU social, Friendica and Hubzilla — and on the shared ActivityPub standard they all speak. We aim to match those, not just whatever one popular app happens to accept, so Klonkt can talk to every server. Following the standard is our floor, not our ceiling: Klonkt is free to do more than the mainstream apps as long as it stays compatible — simpler servers simply ignore the extra bits. And we check our work against several real servers, not just one.

Self-hosting Klonkt? Update to the latest version — run klonkt-update, or use the Updates page in your admin panel — to pick up these improvements.

Switching a site to solo (federation off) works again

We fixed a significant bug: on a Klonkt site, turning the fediverse off — running solo without federation — could make the entire site return “page not found” instead of simply disabling federation. Posts, admin, everything 404'd until federation was switched back on.

The cause was a routing guard that, with federation off, rejected every request rather than only the federation endpoints (/ap/*, WebFinger, NodeInfo). It now steps aside cleanly, so the rest of your site keeps serving as normal.

Toggling federation on or off is fully safe again. Federation (Circles) is on by default, and you can switch it any time under Admin → Settings.

Self-hosting Klonkt? Update to the latest version — run klonkt-update, or use the Updates page in your admin panel — to pick up the fix.