Headwater

Your own single-user social network, federated over encrypted email.

Headwater feels like a small personal Pleroma or Mastodon instance, but there is no multi-user server and no ActivityPub. Your identity is a chatmail address, your feed is an end-to-end-encrypted Delta Chat broadcast, and following someone means joining their feed with an invite link.

Download a nightly

Download the latest Headwater desktop nightly

Nightlies are built from the latest tested main branch for:

Platform	Download
Linux x64	Flatpak (recommended) or AppImage
Windows x64	NSIS installer (.exe)
macOS Apple silicon	DMG (.dmg)

These are unsigned alpha development builds. They are not notarized or signed by a trusted developer certificate, may trigger operating-system warnings, and must be updated manually. Broader abrupt-process recovery and packaged create/restore acceptance work is still incomplete, so treat identities created with nightlies as disposable. Compare downloads with SHA256SUMS.txt on the release page to detect corruption; because the checksums are published beside unsigned artifacts, they do not prove publisher identity.

The application stores identity and account data separately from the downloaded installer or executable. A nightly is not a backup. Use Settings → Backup to create an encrypted Headwater backup before replacing or removing data. Flatpak and AppImage use separate data locations and do not automatically share or migrate identities.

What Headwater looks like

Each Headwater node belongs to one person. It runs the web interface and a local daemon that translates familiar social actions into encrypted Delta Chat messages:

Headwater app → local daemon → Delta Chat core → chatmail relay

Relays temporarily store encrypted mail and cannot read post bodies or recover your identity keys. They can still observe delivery metadata such as addresses, timing, and message sizes. Store-and-forward delivery lets your node go offline and catch up later within the relay's finite retention window.

Try it

1. Install a desktop nightly, or run Headwater with a container.
2. Create an account and choose a display name. Headwater registers a chatmail address for you.
3. Save the required recovery backup and keep its passphrase separately. Headwater cannot recover either one for you.
4. Paste this example invite into the app's search box and choose Follow this feed:

Follow lain's Headwater feed

https://i.delta.chat/#4C32E895E490B1D686A1E83A7B57BBE71A581118&v=3&x=G55gNRWoui_KFVUaXWZKCXL2&j=fB5efM7GCJntgRY0W6mgnqvS&s=WLtaS8FadzpCB8Im0KzjLpLS&a=5c9cl0rs2%40nine.testrun.org&n=lain&b=lain%27s+feed

Share the public invite from your own Share your feed card so other people can follow you. Followers-only invites grant access and should be handed out privately, never published. This example uses a public test relay and may become unavailable if its demo account is inactive for the relay's retention period.

Run with Docker or Podman

The desktop app is the easiest way to try Headwater. For a persistent local web node, the production container listens only on 127.0.0.1:4030 by default:

git clone https://github.com/lambadalambda/headwater.git
cd headwater
docker compose up -d
# or
podman compose up -d

Open http://localhost:4030 and follow the enrollment instructions printed by docker compose logs -f or podman compose logs -f. Keep the generated headwater-data volume: deleting it deletes the local identity. See the development and operations guide for updates, direct Podman usage, reverse proxies, and data paths.

Current scope

Headwater supports public, followers-only, and direct posts; invite-based following; replies and thread backfill; verified boosts; favourites and emoji reactions; notifications and live updates; image attachments and alt text; profiles, petnames, search over known content; and encrypted backup/restore.

It deliberately has no network-wide directory or anonymously fetchable global post namespace. Some familiar fediverse features remain unavailable in the bundled daemon, including human chat threads, persisted bookmarks, federated deletion, mute/block, polls, content warnings, and audio/video uploads. The UI hides or labels unsupported controls rather than pretending they work.

Documentation

• Development and operations: source setup, containers, local security, two-node testing, backups, CI, repository layout, and migration.
• Architecture and protocol docs
• Frontend/daemon capability contract
• Implementation history

License

Headwater is released into the public domain under the Unlicense.