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The Fediverse deserves a dumb graphical client
I love the Fediverse. I have been on it for years, and it remains the only social network where I actually enjoy spending time. No algorithmic feed pushing outrage, no dark patterns, no surveillance capitalism. Just people talking to each other over an open protocol.
But every time I wanted to recommend it to someone, I ran into the same wall: the clients are heavy. Mastodon's web interface ships megabytes of JavaScript. Elk, Phanpy, Ivory, beautiful apps, but they require a modern browser, a fast connection, and a device manufactured in the last five years ...
New blog post :
https://adele.pages.casa/md/blog/the-fediverse-deserves-a-dumb-graphical-client.md
Edit: try #SmolFedi :
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@adele This is neat, and definitely fills a gap within the landscape of fedi clients.
(Also, hi from SmolFedi! 😃)
@adele There's also Brutaldon
https://brutaldon.org/
which is very usable within Lynx & other minimalist browsers.
#fediverse #feditip
@adele After seeing that you built your own, I almost feel bad in recommending it... but have you tried Pinafore?
I've switched to it as a web frontend to my instance whenever I'm on a PC. It's lightning fast and super easy and comfortable to use. 🙂
@adele or even non js light web client /embed not works anymore...
@adele Okay; this is actually really cool. Well done!
@adele @coreysnipes Wait, is the Mastodon web client meaningfully larger than Facebook or Twitter?
@jeffmcneill @adele @coreysnipes
How much RAM does Facebook or Twitter use (I don't use either so I can't check)? I'm currently using 165MB of RAM in a tab in the vivaldi browser with the Mastodon web client
@RantingCanuck @adele @coreysnipes can't blame Mastodon for all of that, look to the sins of the browser...
@RantingCanuck @adele @coreysnipes
On Chromium, the Mastodon web client starts up using 236 mb on Hacyderm.io, using the "full deck view" (5 columns), but it reduces fairly quickly (within a minute or two) to 100+ mb (I have auto-refresh turned off, but even manually refreshing this stays the same).
Meanwhile Facebook is up to 334mb and doesn't drop any of it. Twitter, without even logging in, is at 151mb and it slowly climbs up from there (memory leak?.
The point here is that Mastodon web client is really no different from Facebook and Twitter, and in some ways is much better. It is not a huge ask to get people to try and use that web client, and there are great mobile clients that work nicely. I use the open source Moshidon and it is at 76mb on my Android device.
@silverpill @billstatler what do you think about this ☝🏼?
@elvecio @adele @billstatler Sounds interesting, similar to Bloat. But I didn't try it.
@adele@social.pollux.casa idk, I use Metatext on iOS. Doesn’t seem heavyweight. The app is 32 meg.
@adele using tut (i believe) you can open media links. I use feh and it widens like a charm.
Still, I totally agree with needing a dumb graphical client.
@adele depends what platform you're looking for, but maybe try tuba for linux? for windows, there are a bunch of clients made for blind people, made to be as uncluttered as possible, but they have visible interfaces sighted people can use as well, one of those I know of is FastSM, apparently it works with bluesky too
@adele This is a disease of the modern web in gestalt. Stupid text-based pretendy-fun-time games (MUSHes) have a web interface, in the most popular rendition, that completely fails on an even slightly unreliable network feed because it downloads who knows HOW many hundreds of megabytes of useless crap for the browser ...
... just so we can type text at each other.
@adele this seems like a fantastic project! Do you have any screenshots or a publicly accessible instance? I’d love to see what it looks like in action. Great work!
Ignoring image decoding, but that can be avoided entirely by disabling image support.
@adele I took at this. It's pleasantly lightweight. The only thing I miss is that it doesn't group duplicate notifications; grouping is really helpful for those rare occasions when more than a couple of people like what I post. I guess it takes some code to do that which is perhaps against the aims of the project.
@adele I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "modern browser" and what the alternative would be, but you only ever should browse the web with a fully patched up to date browser and not encourage use of outdated software full of security holes.
Also, I have a device at home that is 10 years old (or even more? 🤔) and I'm pretty sure it runs Mastodon just fine.
That said, I really hate the mindset of "we have RAM and bandwidth and all that so we can happily waste it away".
Optimize your 💩
@adele @GroupNebula563 that's what you wanted i think
@adele
This is fast and enjoyable. I had to twig that you have to scroll to the bottom to reply.
Fairphone+e/OS with Ironfox
@adele
The global vision is really clear and long posts are comfortable to read on it but I haven't succeeded in opening the answer window when I wanted to give to your post. Isn't it available yet?
@adele I love minimalistic interfaces like this. Thank you.
@adele looking at the terminal Mastodon clients mentioned, toot TUI should show images in line if the terminal supports that https://toot.bezdomni.net/ - something else for me to try out… thanks!
@adele i have been using Smither (https://codeberg.org/nuclearfog/Smither) for Android. it is a pretty complete & lightweight client for mobile.
@adele Merci pour la MAJ qui affiche l’UI en français !