Introduction

Omicron is a federated blogging platform. You write rich-text posts, readers follow you, and your writing travels across the fediverse over ActivityPub — without a company in the middle deciding who gets to read it.

It is designed to be run by one person on one small server. Nothing about it assumes a hosting company, a managed database, or a paid plan.

What Omicron is

• A blog, not a microblog. The unit of publishing is an article with a title, a cover image, and formatted body text — closer to Medium than to Mastodon, but speaking the same protocol.
• Federated. Every user on your instance is an ActivityPub actor. People on Mastodon, other Omicron instances, and any other ActivityPub software can follow them, like posts, boost them, and reply.
• Self-hosted. One docker compose up brings up the entire stack, including the database, the queue, and automatic HTTPS.
• Free software. AGPL-3.0-or-later. If you modify it and run it as a network service, your users are entitled to your source.

What Omicron is not

• It is not a hosted service. There is no omicron.com to sign up for; you run it or you join someone else’s instance.
• It is not a Twitter clone. There are no character limits, no boosts of boosts of boosts, no algorithmic timeline.
• It is not an analytics product. On-instance view counts are deliberately crude and unlinkable — see Writer dashboard.

Who it is for

Writers who want a clean place to publish that they control, and who want their work to reach the fediverse rather than a walled garden.

Instance operators who are comfortable running one command on a VPS. The project treats “toy-easy setup” as a hard requirement: you never edit a config file, generate a secret, or touch a TLS certificate by hand.

Developers who want a small, readable codebase to build on. The architecture is deliberately boring — layered, with the database reachable only through repository functions.

The stack

Layer	Technology
Backend	Deno, Hono, Fedify (ActivityPub), Drizzle ORM
Database	PostgreSQL
Queue and cache	Redis (optional — falls back to in-process)
Frontend	SvelteKit, Bits UI, Tailwind CSS, Tiptap
Entrypoint	Caddy, with on-demand Let’s Encrypt certificates

Everything ships in a single docker-compose.yml. You do not install or manage any of these individually.

What running an instance gives you

• A public blog at your own domain, over HTTPS, with certificates issued and renewed automatically.
• A fediverse identity for every account: @you@your-domain.
• An admin panel for instance settings, email, moderation, users, and defederation — no config files.
• Automatic, idempotent database migrations on every upgrade.
• A writer dashboard with engagement figures that never profile your readers.

Where to go next

• Quick start — get an instance running now.
• Core concepts — the vocabulary the rest of these docs uses.
• Requirements — what a public instance needs.
• Architecture — how the code is organised.