Simon Willison’s Weblog

Phanpy. Phanpy is “a minimalistic opinionated Mastodon web client” by Chee Aun.

I think that description undersells it. It’s beautifully crafted and designed and has a ton of innovative ideas—they way it displays threads and replies, the “Catch-up” beta feature, it’s all a really thoughtful and fresh perspective on how Mastodon can work.

I love that all Mastodon servers (including my own dedicated instance) offer a CORS-enabled JSON API which directly supports building these kinds of alternative clients.

Building a full-featured client like this one is a huge amount of work, but building a much simpler client that just displays the user’s incoming timeline could be a pretty great educational project for people who are looking to deepen their front-end development skills.