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Comment by bmacho | Hacker News Reader

It says

    To use the Mastodon web application, please enable JavaScript. Alternatively, try one of the native apps for Mastodon for your platform.

Good job, Mastodon. (No, I am not the same guys that complain they don't see javascript games or utilities without javascript. But I think I should be able to see a text on the Internet?)

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You might want to try Brutaldon, a free and open source Mastodon web client that works without JavaScript. Brutaldon can optionally be self-hosted and it also supports Pleroma.

- Brutaldon: https://brutaldon.org

- Source: https://gitlab.com/brutaldon/brutaldon

How do you use this to see the above thread?

After logging in to Brutaldon, click the Search button at the top, paste the URL of the thread into the field, and submit the form. The Mastodon post appears. Click the "thread" link to expand the entire thread.

So... I have to go to a different Mastodon instance, create an account, use it to log in here. And then I can see the thread "painlessly"?

It's no better for twitter. You have to use a community fronted and hope it hasn't been rate limited. Then you can't even reply. Very painless.

It is much better for twitter, since I can use nitter, and read whatever is written there, and I can't do the same for mastodon.

Add `/embed` to the end of the URL.

Wow, I did not know about that!

Still, it doesn't show the rest of the toots, so content posted on Mastodon is still not readable without javascript. Which is ridiculous, we have medium, twitter, facebook, reddit etc, and they decided to publish somewhere not readable without javascript.

I do agree that the default Mastodon web client should display a static page when the user has JavaScript disabled in their browser.

The issue is being tracked here: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/19953

Sadly, like most web application devs these days, most Mastodon frontends require Javascript to function. There are a few smaller projects that don't but there's no nitter.net for Mastodon just yet. The people behind Mastodon don't seem to have any interest in server side rendering at least.

I'm really surprised every time anyone complains that a web-application (not just a plain web site) doesn't work without JS.

I mean it's an application, applications contain code and tracking that code state server side can involve a non small amount of additional cost.

Sure they could have a web-side like non-logged in viewer mode and then somehow using hydration magic transition to being a app on demand, but that is a bunch of additional work (i.e. cost) for a very small number of people.

But here is a good thing, it's open source so you or any of the view people which care about no-js could try to contribute such a "view only web-site" functionality, or crate an alternative web client which solely uses server side rendering or similar.

But in the end that's not worth your time right (at least for me it wouldn't be if I where in your situation)? So why expect anyone who doesn't even get any benefits from it to invest that time?

I complain about the content (which is text) being not available. I couldn't care less about the web-application. In general too, but especially here, where people are supposed to share mostly text each other. (We can share web-applications as well, and you won't find me complain there.)

At this point I could just flag every mastodon content, since it is not available. Good idea, I will just do that.

> At this point I could just flag every mastodon content, since it is not available. Good idea, I will just do that.

If HN requires sources to be available in no-js only form yes, that would be appropriate, if not it would be abuse of the flagging feature.

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