Semaphore ⛳

Continuation of the Pinafore project. To keep from burning out it will have restricted input from wider community, more details will follow.

Credit must go to Nolan and the original contributors for their excellent work.

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

Semaphore is available at semaphore.social. Beta releases are at beta.semaphore.social.

See the user guide for basic usage. See the admin guide if Semaphore cannot connect to your instance.

For updates and support, follow @semaphore@fosstodon.org.

Browser support

Semaphore 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
• Small page weight
• Fast even on low-end devices
• Accessibility
• Offline support in read-only mode
• Progressive Web App features
• Multi-instance support
• Support latest versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari
• Support non-Mastodon instances (e.g. Pleroma) as well as possible
• Internationalization

Secondary / possible future goals

• Serve as an alternative frontend tied to a particular instance
• Offline search

Non-goals

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

Building

Semaphore requires Node.js and Yarn.

To build Semaphore for production, first install dependencies:

yarn --production --pure-lockfile

Then build:

yarn build

Then run:

PORT=4002 node server.js

Docker

To build a Docker image for production:

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

Now Semaphore is running at localhost:4002.

docker-compose

Alternatively, use docker-compose to build and serve the image for production:

docker-compose up --build -d

The image will build and start, then detach from the terminal running at localhost:4002.

Updating

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

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

Exporting

Semaphore is a static site. When you run yarn build, static files will be written to __sapper__/export.

It is not recommended to directly expose these files when self-hosting. Instead, you should use node server.js (e.g. with an nginx or Apache proxy in front). This adds several things you don't get from the raw static files:

• CSP headers (important for security)
• Certain dynamic routes (less important because of Service Worker managing routing, but certain things could break if Service Workers are disabled in the user's browser)

Having an nginx config generator is currently an open issue.

Developing and testing

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

Changelog

For a changelog, see the GitHub releases.

For a list of breaking changes, see BREAKING_CHANGES.md.

What's with the name?

Semaphore is a fork of Pinafore and apparently they were going to call the boat H.M.S Semaphore but thought Pinafore was more fun. Bonus - semaphore is an old communication method.