The Fediverse deserves a dumb graphical client

2026-04-09 18:30

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.

There are CLI clients, toot and tut are both solid, genuinely lightweight, and a pleasure to use in a terminal. But the Fediverse without images is a lesser experience. People share photos, artwork, screenshots. A terminal client gets you the text; it does not get you the whole picture.

What I wanted was something in between: a client that runs in a plain browser, handles images properly, but does not require a JavaScript engine to display a list of posts. The API returns JSON; a server-side script can turn that JSON into HTML just fine. We have been doing that for 25 years.

So I built SmolFedi.

It is a PHP application. No npm, no Composer, no build step. It uses a SQLite database and basic PHP sessions. Every page is generated server-side and sent as plain HTML. It supports multiple accounts, timelines, notifications, polls, media attachments with alt text, content warnings, compose, reply, boost, favourite, everything I actually use day to day. CSS stays within smolweb Grade B. There is not a single line of JavaScript in the codebase.

It works with Mastodon, GoToSocial and certainly other compatible Fediverse platforms. It works in Firefox, in Chromium, in Safari, in any browser that can render HTML and display a JPEG such as Dillo or Netsurf.

I am not claiming this is the right client for everyone. If you want a smooth single-page experience with live updates and animations, SmolFedi is not that. But if you want to browse the Fediverse on a modest device, a slow connection, or simply a setup where you would rather not run megabytes of JavaScript fetched from the web, SmolFedi is for you.

The source is on Codeberg and a demo instance on Pollux

What do you think of that ? Let me know on the Fediverse