this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2026
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

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Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)

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smolfedi - A lightweight, no-JavaScript Fediverse client written in PHP by Adele at Codeberg (codeberg.org)
submitted 1 week ago by skrlet13@feddit.cl to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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[–] bufalo1973@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago

I think the "no-JS' approach is too extreme. I'd rather do a "no-JS framework" buy limited JS.

[–] artwork@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Freaking awesome! I adore PHP! <3

[–] Dojan@pawb.social 1 points 1 week ago

This is something you don’t see every day.

I have no strong feelings about php, but I love your enthusiasm.

[–] Maestro@fedia.io 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Mbin (like fedia.io and others) is also PHP, built on Symfony

[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 days ago

Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte are all built in PHP. All they need to run is a LAMP stack. That's why even a feature monster like Hubzilla needs fewer server resources per user than Mastodon.

They only have a little bit of JavaScript for some UI elements such as spoiler tags.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

When someone's on Mastodon, and they say, "Fediverse," chances are very good that it's only Mastodon that they're talking about.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I understand that coming from users, but not from the project developers. They know they've built a client for the Mastodon API, so it should be described as such.

[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago

There have already been too many spare-time devs who came to Mastodon, got totally excited about everything, decided to develop something for "the Fediverse", built it hard against only Mastodon and then learned that the Fediverse is, in fact, not only Mastodon.

See FediDevs which, for quite a while, was built against only Mastodon and against Mastodon-specific elements of Mastodon, which did not work with anything that isn't Mastodon, but which still kept "Fedi" in its name.