Connect to Mastodon using HTTP 1.0 with Brutaldon

Today post is about Brutaldon, a Mastodon/Pleroma interface in old fashion HTML like in the web 1.0 era. I will explain how it works and how to install it. Tested and approved on an 16 years old powerpc laptop, using Mastodon with w3m or dillo web browsers!

Introduction

Brutaldon is a mastodon client running as a web server. This mean you have to connect to a running brutaldon server, you can use a public one like Brutaldon.online and then you will have two ways to connect to your account:

1. using oauth which will redirect through a dedicated API page of your mastodon instance and will give back a token once you logged in properly, this is totally safe of use, but requires javascript to be enabled to works due to the login page on the instance
2. there is “old login” method in which you have to provide your instance address, your account login and password. This is not really safe because the brutaldon instance will known about your credentials, but you can use any web browser with that. There are not much security issues if you use a local brutaldon instance

How to install it

The installation is quite easy, I wish this could be as easy more often. You need a python3 interpreter and pipenv. If you don’t have pipenv, you need pip to install pipenv. On OpenBSD this would translates as:

$ pip3.8 install --user pipenv

Note that on some system, pip3.8 could be pip3, or pip. Due to the coexistence of python2 and python3 for some time until we can get ride of python2, most python related commands have a suffix to tell which python version it uses.

If you install pipenv with pip, the path will be ~/.local/bin/pipenv.

Now, very easy to proceed! Clone the code, run pipenv to get the dependencies, create a sqlite database and run the server.

$ git clone git://github.com/jfmcbrayer/brutaldon.git
$ cd brutaldon
$ pipenv install
$ pipenv run python ./manage.py migrate
$ pipenv run python ./manage.py runserver

And voilà! Your brutaldon instance is available on http://localhost:8000, you only need to open it on your web browser and log-in to your instance.

As explained in the INSTALL.md file of the project, this method isn’t suitable for a public deployment. The code is a Django webapp and could be used with wsgi and a proper web server. This setup is beyond the scope of this article.