Sporadic

Note: this project is very young still, but it now offers a working API. It's a bit brittle, and subject to revisions, but you can now log in and access private statuses and read timelines!

Sporadic is a design experiment for the fediverse. The goal is to port the user interface of Diaspora* so that it works with Mastodon and Pleroma . My intention is to build an interface for long-form status updates that resembles the older Diaspora UI of the past. There are several reasons for doing this:

1. It demonstrates the versatility of fediverse applications.
2. It demonstrates a world where Diaspora adopts the ActivityPub protocol
3. It helps me learn how to make web clients.

The majority of this project was inspired by an older project by Kaniini called Feather, which kind of had some similar goals. I decided to start over from scratch to get a better sense of how things are supposed to be put together, and maybe make some early design decisions of my own.

Goals

• Be compatible with the Mastodon API (as well as some of Pleroma's APIs as well)
• Provide a frontend that's very easy to set up and install
• Visually approximate Diaspora's interface and functionality, but with a more modern framework and leaner code
• Make it possible for fediverse instances to optionally use this frontend instead of the default offerings of their respective platforms.
• Make another Pleroma frontend that supports Chat, but isn't itself based on SoapBox or React
• Once Diaspora's original UI layout is completed, revamp everything into an actually good UI.

Build Setup

# install dependencies
npm install
# serve with hot reload at localhost:8080
npm run dev
# build for production with minification
npm run build
# build for production and view the bundle analyzer report
npm run build --report
# run unit tests
npm run unit
# run e2e tests
npm run e2e
# run all tests
npm test

Setting up the client

*Note: these instructions assume you're running a single-tenant instance. The OAuth request is currently scoped to a user. In the future, this will likely get tweaked for community instances, but it's currently limited due to how I had to develop things **

In the /static directory, there's a config.json.example file. Copy it over to config.json and fill out the values.

To get those values, you need to do the OAuth dance. Here's how to do it in cURL:

1. Register your application.

curl -XPOST -F client_name=Sporadic -F redirect_uris=urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob -F 'scopes=read write follow' https://your.instance/api/v1/apps

2. Now, get the OAuth token. Make sure that your grant_type is 'password', and that you supply user credentials!

curl -XPOST -F 'client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID' -F 'client_secret=YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET' -F 'redirect_uri=urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob' -F 'grant_type=password' -F 'username=YOURUSERNAME' -F 'password=YOURPASSWORD' https://your.instance/oauth/token

3. Copy and paste those values into the config file, then go ahead and sign in at /login

For detailed explanation on how things work, checkout the guide and docs for vue-loader.