Connect to Mastodon using HTTP 1.0 with Brutaldon

• Author: Solène
• Date: 09 November 2020
• Tags: openbsd mastodon

=> Comment on Mastodon

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.