I was super excited when I saw the headline because I am just about to deploy a headless ActivityPub server, then I realized it’s a client for the Mastodon API.
You can try it at https://smolfedi.pollux.casa/
I took it for a spin the other day. I was disappointed to find that despite it being very lightweight in terms of client requirements (great!) it is extremely slow. I surmise that every page load is making requests to the Mastodon API on your mastodon instance (like a client app would, except this one is running on a server…) rather than caching anything locally. This kinda nullifies the benefits of being a ‘lightweight client’ in the first place - the UX is getting nerfed for no gain in speed.
Still I appreciate the no-JS ideal and the extreme compatibility and am looking forward to seeing where this project goes.
Freaking awesome! I adore PHP! <3
This is something you don’t see every day.
I have no strong feelings about php, but I love your enthusiasm.
Mbin (like fedia.io and others) is also PHP, built on Symfony
Listen, I’m going to shamelessly self promote my project all I can! Also PHP, also Symfony: Habitat is a platform for local communities. I don’t think PHP gets enough love! It’s incredibly versatile and is actually very fast in recent years.
Oh, that sounds nice! How does it work though? Are instances fully self-contained? Or is there cross instance federation or discoverability?
It is currently not federated, and I should be careful with my words because people often confuse my intent when I talk about this. Federation is planned but ActivityPub is not. More details on this are on github.
I do love me some /forms!
Adele Codeberg? She was one of the designers of Smalltalk, I thought. So I’m surprised to hear that about PHP.
Copyright says Adele, and this code is at Codeberg. I wasn’t sure how to write it.
I was making a joke about one of the Smalltalk pioneers, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adele_Goldberg_(computer_scientist) .
I think the "no-JS’ approach is too extreme. I’d rather do a “no-JS framework” buy limited JS.
