npm install -g sockethub@next

The container image follows at ghcr.io/sockethub/sockethub:next.

Email

@sockethub/platform-email receives mail over IMAP and sends it over SMTP. Your mail server stays the message store: Sockethub keeps no mailbox database and never changes read flags, moves messages, or deletes mail.

• fetch pages through one or more folders, filtered by sender and recipient, with per-folder cursors so your app can resume where it left off.
• watch follows a folder with IMAP IDLE and pushes new messages to the browser as post activities.
• send submits a message over SMTP and reports which recipients the server accepted or rejected.

Credentials take a password or an access token for each of IMAP and SMTP. Connections require TLS or STARTTLS. See the email section of the platforms page for the envelopes.

Messenger and Instagram

@sockethub/platform-messenger and @sockethub/platform-instagram send text messages through Meta's Messenger and Instagram APIs. Both are stateless: store a token, then send. No connect step and no webhook hosting. Sockethub sends as a Facebook Page or an Instagram professional account, not as a personal profile, and your app brings the recipient's scoped ID from its own incoming-message integration.

These are outgoing-only. Incoming messages, delivery receipts, attachments, and OAuth onboarding stay with your application and Meta's review process.

Also in beta.2

• The metadata platform now surfaces a schema.org Event embedded as JSON-LD, so link previews for Luma, Meetup, and Eventbrite pages carry the event name, start and end, location, and status.
• CalDAV accepts and round-trips STATUS on events, and calendar and address book discovery is cached across requests.
• XMPP roster activities are schema-valid, and inbound subscription requests now arrive as request-friend.
• IRC refuses to connect to private and loopback addresses, and incoming NOTICE lines are attributed to their sender.
• The server rate-limits persistent platform starts per client IP.

The full changelog has every fix. The documentation on this site tracks beta.2: get started and platforms.

npm install -g sockethub@next

Prereleases now publish under the next tag, for npm and for the container image at ghcr.io/sockethub/sockethub:next. The old @alpha tag stays at the last alpha and will not be updated again.

When we announced the alphas in January we said we'd post again once we reached beta. This is that post.

What beta means

The alpha series was about getting the architecture right: the package split, the move to Bun and BullMQ, and the canonical AS2.0 contexts. That work is done. Beta means the shape of 5.0 is settled.

• This is largely what 5.0 will be. The message envelope, the client API, the platform interface, and the published schemas are in their 5.0 form. Code written against the beta should carry over to the final release.
• It is already stable. The last stretch of alphas went into hardening rather than features, mostly IRC session and nick handling, CardDAV round-trip correctness, and safer outbound fetching. It has held up well in day-to-day use.
• It is not a complete feature freeze. We will still land additions that leave existing behaviour alone, and the newer platforms (CalDAV and CardDAV) will keep filling out.
• Breaking changes are the exception now. When one is unavoidable it is listed under Breaking Changes at the top of the release notes, as the IRC attendance change is in beta.0. If that section is empty, upgrading is safe.

New in beta.0

Beyond the fixes, a few things landed since the last alpha:

• The server serves an info page at its root and advertises its connection endpoints in the service descriptor, so clients can connect by discovery instead of a hardcoded URL.
• A GET /health endpoint for anyone running Sockethub behind a load balancer or orchestrator.
• CalDAV reads published iCalendar feeds, and the CardDAV example now covers create, edit, delete, and list.
• IRC can list a server's channels, and answers attendance queries with a single members message.

The full changelog has everything.

The road to 5.0

We expect a short beta series rather than another long one. Each beta will bundle the fixes that come out of real use, and 5.0.0 follows once those settle down. The most useful thing you can do is run the beta against your own IRC, XMPP, or DAV servers and tell us what breaks.

The documentation on this site tracks the beta: get started, platforms, and the client and server guides.

What changed

Before:

{
  "context": "irc",
  "type": "send",
  ...
}

After:

{
  "@context": [
    "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
    "https://sockethub.org/ns/context/v1.jsonld",
    "https://sockethub.org/ns/context/platform/irc/v1.jsonld"
  ],
  "type": "send",
  ...
}

The server now routes by resolving the platform context URL in that array, not by matching a bespoke context string. That unlocks four things:

• Proper AS2.0 compliance. Payloads validate against any off-the-shelf JSON-LD or AS2 tool — no Sockethub-specific reader required.
• Deterministic platform resolution. The platform identity lives in the context URL itself, not in convention. No more guessing from a short name.
• Versioned platform vocabularies. A platform can ship breaking changes under /v2.jsonld without forcing every consumer to migrate at once.
• A real schema registry. The server exposes each platform's schema metadata (contextUrl, contextVersion, schemaVersion) so clients build canonical arrays without hardcoding URLs.

New client APIs

Two additions to @sockethub/client make this easy:

await sc.ready()

Waits for the schema registry to finish loading. Messages sent before readiness are queued and flushed afterward; anything emitted after ready() is validated immediately on the client.

const sc = new SockethubClient(socket);
await sc.ready();

sc.contextFor(platform)

Builds the canonical three-element array from server metadata. Use it instead of hardcoding URLs:

sc.socket.emit('message', {
  '@context': sc.contextFor('irc'),
  type: 'send',
  actor:  { id: 'alice@irc.libera.chat', type: 'person', name: 'alice' },
  target: { id: '#sockethub@irc.libera.chat', type: 'room', name: '#sockethub' },
  object: { type: 'message', content: 'hello' }
});

contextFor() is preferred over hand-writing the array because it derives URLs from the live schema registry and stays correct across server versions.

Why this matters

Sockethub has always carried the spirit of AS2.0, but not always the letter. Alpha 12 closes that gap. The protocol gateway now speaks a format that any AS2 consumer can read — which means an ActivityPub inbox, a Fediverse tool, or anything that knows JSON-LD can parse Sockethub traffic natively.

Upgrade with npm install -g sockethub@alpha. Full changelog: v5.0.0-alpha.12.

Stability has improved a lot and so we're announcing the alpha releases are available for anyone who'd like to try them out.

We won't individually announce each alpha release, but will do so once we move to beta.

Some new features include:

• Packaging changes, the sockethub package is still the main package, but works as a meta package for a number of packages in the @sockethub namespace. i e.g. @sockethub/server, @sockethub/client, @sockethub/platform-xmpp
• Greatly improved unit and integration tests
• A New Metadata Platform!
• An Examples package
• Migrate to BullMQ
• Migrate to Bun
• Improved documentation
• So much more...

To try it out, you can run npm install -g sockethub@alpha

For a full list of changes, see the Sockethub release page.

I haven't been announcing every Sockethub release, as they are very frequent and incremental, but be sure to check the github to see the latest activity.

[ kosmos | github.com/67p/hyperchannel | github.com/sockethub/sockethub]

[ release v1.0.4 ]

[ release v1.0.0 | CHANGELOG ]

[ release v0.3.0 | CHANGELOG ]

[ release v0.2.0 | CHANGELOG ]

[ dogfeed | github repository | official announcement ]

[ talk overview ]