8bloat
8bloat (also known as 8b) is a fork of the venerable BloatFE Pleroma/Mastodon client by r. It intends to take the BloatFE experience you know and love and make it usable for more people as a primary client. We try to remain as faithful as possible to Upstream Bloat's design when implementing new features; Bloat has a very unique feel that we don't want to ruin.
8bloat runs as a server you connect to through your browser. After authorising the server, it talks to your Mastodon instance on your behalf and generates HTML from what the server tells it. It's strongly reccommended you put 8bloat on the same server or network as the instance if possible. This will reduce latency and make the client as fast as possible for users. It's also reccommended you enable single instance mode so that people don't use your 8bloat instance to spam others (since, in a sense, it's a proxy.)
In order for the client to work, you give the server your authentication token. Only use instances of 8bloat you trust. Though, nothing's stopping that Javascript client hosted by someone untrusted from updating itself without your knowledge to steal your tokens. Just be careful.
features
- Javascript is optional, and enables some small niceties
- Simple, straightforward, and easy to understand interface
- Independent frames for notifications, composition, and threads, which allows multitasking unlike similar clients
- 8bloat's pages can be smaller than the API responses, so it may end up being faster in some situations
- Has features to improve wellbeing, such as the ability to hide dopamine traps
- Very snappy, even on low-end hardware
- Better support for niche and older browsers than most clients
- Custom CSS
- Supports single-instance mode so you can restrict the users
improvements over upstream bloat
- Added support for post editing
- Added support for adding alt text via post editing
- Added support for subject headers (AKA content warnings)
- Added support for viewing reactions
- Added support for pinning posts, and viewing them on a user's profile
- Added support for local posts on supported servers
- Added flag "-wc" to print out a stock config to stdout
- Fixed flashing white when moving between pages (the root page now respects your theme)
- Fixed whitespace on Pleroma so ASCII art and code looks normal
- Fixed external sites being opened in the frame, they now always open in another tab
- Fixed many small things for Mastodon, such as having a proper message for replies and showing the relationship proper on a user's profile
- Removed some unused or redundant config options
- Improved security with strict CSP (which makes XSS attacks pretty much impossible for clients that support it)
- Improved speed when navigating the client thanks to aggressive and precise caching of static assets
- Improved UI with sensitive attachments, it's now a dropdown that requires an explicit click
- Improved the stock CSS (slightly) to improve accessibility
- Improved the codebase by rewriting and refactoring all of the backend code, should be much easier to understand and hack on
- No longer requires runtime directories, as templates and other data is embedded in the binary
- More, since I can't remember them all