Pinafore

An alternative web client for Mastodon, focused on speed and simplicity.

Pinafore is available at pinafore.social. Bleeding-edge releases are at dev.pinafore.social.

See the user guide for basic usage. See the admin guide to troubleshoot instance compatibility issues.

For updates and support, follow us at @pinafore@mastodon.technology.

Browser support

Pinafore supports the latest versions of the following browsers:

• Chrome
• Edge
• Firefox
• Safari

Compatible versions of each (Opera, Brave, Samsung, etc.) should be fine.

Goals and non-goals

Goals

• Support the most common use cases
• Fast even on low-end phones
• Works offline in read-only mode
• Progressive Web App features
• Multi-instance support
• Support latest versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari
• a11y (keyboard navigation, screen readers)

Possible future goals

• Works as an alternative frontend self-hosted by instances
• Android/iOS apps (using Cordova or similar)
• Support Pleroma/non-Mastodon backends
• i18n
• Offline search
• Full emoji keyboard
• Keyboard shortcuts

Non-goals

• Supporting old browsers, proxy browsers, or text-based browsers
• React Native / NativeScript / hybrid-native version
• Full functionality with JavaScript disabled
• Emoji support beyond the built-in system emoji
• Multi-column support
• Admin/moderation panel
• Works offline in read-write mode (would require sophisticated sync logic)

Building

Pinafore requires Node.js v8+ and npm.

To build Pinafore for production:

npm install
npm run build
PORT=4002 npm start

Docker

To build a docker image for production:

docker build .
docker run -d -p 4002:4002 [your-image]

Now Pinafore is running at localhost:4002.

Updating

To keep your version of Pinafore up to date, you can use git to check out the latest tag:

git checkout $(git tag -l | sort -Vr | head -n 1)

Exporting

You can export Pinafore as a static site. Run:

npm run export

Static files will be written to __sapper__/export.

Note that this is not the recommended method, because CSP headers are not currently supported for the exported version.

Developing and testing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for how to run Pinafore in dev mode and run tests.

Changelog

For a changelog, see the GitHub releases.