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Comment by weberer | Hacker News Reader

Thanks. Its insane how "Twitter, but for tech nerds" has a hard requirement to either enable Javascript or download some app.

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Mastodons will also respond to a plain "application/json" HTTP request, no cruft,

    curl 'https://beige.party/api/v1/statuses/117057396732763183' | jq '.content'

If only we had a tool that could directly let us browse through this as human readable text.

Mine's called Safari

what, like an app?

obscure fruit based cli tool.

i think they call it a web browser, but it looks like it does not do that most of the time.

    curl -s 'https://beige.party/api/v1/statuses/117057396732763183' | jq '.content' | glow

for those terminauts who have incurable presentation ocd

Especially when the page source actually contains all the content (so no need to fetch it in JS), part of which is even presented in title.

It has the content three times (not including the title). Once in json (as escaped html) and twice in meta tags (as plain text). They used to have it in plain html too but that got hidden then removed.

You see read the unescaped html here:

https://beige.party/users/intransitivelie/statuses/117057396...

No stinking js or app required!

FWIF, way back when, Twitter was the "Twitter for tech nerds".

Lots of water under the fridge since...

“Just place all that corporate malware on the X, X marks the spot”

Just have to remember that it's X, not Y, that marks the spot.

That's not how I remember it. Ever since the beginning circa 2008, it was the one site that was being pushed hard by the mainstream media, celebrities, and marketers. None of it was organic. All the tech nerds were on sites like Digg, old Reddit, or Slashdot.

Early Twitter was used loads by tech nerds as a notifications API.

There definitely was a community of experimentation back in early days.

How you remembered it is anecdotal, it's not relevant for the discussion unless you add something of value.

Way back when is not when it broke mainstream. It's when the service started getting attention.

It was literally pitched as a "micro blog site" for techies to communicate news, and the "app" was 160 character SMS messages.

Nerds used it as a free (as in beer) way of sending alert SMS on server errors. (At least I did).

In 2008, twitter had already started to become mainstream, quickly shifting focus away from nerd interests.

What is the meaning of FWIF ?

Google says "For what it's worth", won't that be FWIW ?

Typo. I meant FWIW

https://beige.party/@intransitivelie.rss

> Thanks. Its insane how "Twitter, but for tech nerds" has a hard requirement to either enable Javascript or download some app.

https://masto.mirror.forum/beige.party/@intransitivelie/1170...

Source code: https://github.com/SerJaimeLannister/mastoview

(Disclaimer: It's vibe-coded. It does server side rendering to then just give pure HTML to the end user with no JS required.)

I hope that this helps people who want to view Mastodon without JS.

I had a nice mobile experience. It asks you to log in or create an account, but it’s along the bottom, and you can read all the content fine.

Alternative URL, no Javascript, no app:

https://beige.party/@intransitivelie/117057396732763183.json

   view-source:http://beige.party/@intransitivelie/117057396732763183.json

The toot also appears in "<meta content="

   view-source:https://beige.party/@intransitivelie/117057396732763183 

   curl https://beige.party/@intransitivelie/117057396732763183.json \
   |grep -o "<p>.*<p>" > 1.htm

   firefox ./1.htm

How is that different from email, IRC, instant messaging, or anything else nerds use?

Webmail is perfectly possible, if clunky,without JS. That's how they used to work. IRC and IM require real-time updates of some sort, which is a reasonable use for JS. A Twitter clone shouldn't require JS just to render a page.

You also can run a Mastodon application server side and serve server-rendered pages. I'm not aware of anyone having done that yet, but, you know, be the change you want to see. It's probably got privacy implications.

Public email and IRC archives/logs usually work just fine without Javascript.

Treating HTML as a bootloader for an app has always felt like the wrong pattern to me. Outside of Authn/passkeys, it would seem a person could do basically everything in HTML (but, to be frank, I am not a front end dev and would welcome correction).

It's understandable when you see that the ethos is to have software that represents the user in charge of the rendering, rather than centralizing it all on the server. There is a major difference between common "app store apps" or hostile javascript bundled with websites, versus software that's been written to work in the user's interest. However as they use similar delivery methods, it's understandable that it takes a minute to think through and revisit your assumptions that have lead to being default anti- javascript or app.

That makes sense until you remember what "rendering" is supposed to mean. Forming the HTML has no reason to be client side when you're using the site-provided experience. Yes provide a json version for other clients, but for direct viewing just send the paragraph of text in a usable form and let the javascript be an optional upgrade.

I really don't think that describes my Mastodon experience. Twitter for people with a conscience would be more accurate.

I've found it to be full of completely out of touch basement-type neck beards with questionable consciences. They're both shit holes.

There are a lot of people on Mastodon who are genuinely as insane as X users. I recently opened up my account and saw people engaging with al quds brigade accounts.

Patches welcome

>Patches welcome

Are they, though? Or are you just parroting the meme?

(The last I recall, Gargron's position was essentially "build your own third-party frontend if you want noJS".)

That's what I meant

im sorry but expecting sites to work properly without javascript in 2026 is basically denialism

"Certifiably insane" to enable JavaScript, which was invented in 1995, or install an app, which first happened on the Palm series of smartphones in 1996. Either of those are "certifiably insane"?

For reference, the term neurodiversity was coined circa 1998.

Neither the invention date or the mental health terminology have anything to do with the fact that js being commonplace is a privacy and security nightmare -- which was actually the point.

JavaScript asceticism is a weird trend that has just never died out, no one treats any other language this way... and "privacy and security nightmare" can be used to describe most of the internet at this point with or without it

It can certainly come across as a "weird trend" but I've found that the most insistent for disabling JS are the folks who have deep knowledge of browsers and the security plane running webapps. YMMV.

I don't drive a car because I have deep knowledge of mortality statistics, but I don't complain when I can't easily get somewhere 100 miles away

Showing a paragraph of text with some social links around it is like going down the block. If that requires a car you do have a problem.

yeah but it's an extreme fringe choice... I too make extreme fringe choices but I don't expect 99.9% of the people who don't make my extreme fringe choice to change on my behalf

hell, use a browser in a sandbox if you're that paranoid

there are a number of ways to do this securely, at this point it's practically a child's tantrum

but sure maybe it just needs a couple more decades of complaining in obscure comment sections and everyone will finally get it and switch back to mailing lists

ooh, don't forget irc

> JavaScript asceticism is a weird trend that has just never died out, no one treats any other language this way

I'm not aware of any other language that is layered on top of a perfectly serviceable user-facing content delivery syntax?

Literally any scripting language?

I have managed to get 35 years into a sysadmin career without knowing or writing a single line of python. I see a python script, I run a million miles away and wont touch it with a barge pole.

JS is a vector for browser exploits and privacy invasion. No other language is commonly used for these things.

Not even things like batch files and visual basic scripts on windows? Everyone seems to forget we had decades of dodgy scripts and activex controls in our browsers for years before javascript became the thing it is today.

They were never widely disseminated over a network. Office VBA exploits only lasted as a widespread threat until MS locked down macros by default. JS has been around much longer than that.

I can't recall ever needing to run a batch script to read a paragraph on a website, so doesn't seem like a very apt comparison. Are you claiming there's some group of people who have JavaScript disabled but would be happily running Activex if it were still around? Seems reasonable for some people to dislike and disable JavaScript in 2026, even though another, separate group of people had ActiveX enabled in 2009.

pngs in emails are used for this

http headers and CSS is used for this

flash drives left on the ground outside are used for this

That's because no other language is pushed in a place where people are requesting documents.

JS or installing special software to view HTTP served text from the web?! Yes, that makes no sense at all.

You don't start being sane just because you stubbornly keep the insanity up for long enough.

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