Check out These Beautiful Retro Mastodon Clients!
There’s a specter looming over the realm of Mastodon, and it’s the ghost of computing’s past. A loose group of retro computing hobbyists have taken it upon themselves to build Mastodon clients for various operating systems. Developing web clients using the technology of the 80’s and 90’s is a challenge, but the following projects have proven that their devs are up to the task!
Should we find ourselves in the unlikely scenario where an apocalypse happens, but people can still post to Mastodon using retro PCs,
Without further ado, let me introduce all the wild retro clients that you can use on your computers today!
Mastodon 3.11 For Workgroups (Windows 9x)
Mastodon 3.11 For Workgroups is a client written in Visual Basic 6, designed for Windows 9x systems. The project is the brainchild of Maartje Eyskens, who decided it would be fun to make her old PC post some toots. The client itself is fairly simple, but the nostalgic installer and ability to run on Windows 95 are the real selling points.
The making of:
Macstodon (macOS Classic)
Macstodon is a stunning classic Mac app developed by Scott Small. It was developed on System 7.1.1, and capable of running on either 68k or PowerPC architectures. Scott has a “rough roadmap” of ideas for future features here.
DOStodon (MS-DOS)
DOStodon is the creation of Superllu, who also developed a JavaScript port called DOjS. This became the basis of the app, which is a JavaScript client running on MS-DOS. It’s a fully-featured client, with notifications, tag search, file uploads, and media thumbnails. Many people have had success with installing DOStodon on retro laptops, such as this beauty. I kind of like the idea of taking this to an Internet Cafe.
It has happened! #DOStodon, the #MastodonClient for #RetroComputers running #MSDOS, is now listed on the official App-Page of https://joinmastodon.org/apps
Mastodon for Apple //c
An awesome ASCII Mastodon logo splash. Colin mentioned that he’s very proud of this. 
What a guy! Here’s my post asking retro client developers if they could share some screenshots for this article! 
My goofy profile header, reflected through the monochrome display. 
The creator’s profile picture displayed on the screen. It’s amazing how well the display reflects photorealism, despite the high degree of green pixels.
Colin Leroy-Mira managed to make a client for the Apple II. He has an amazing write-up for how he managed to develop his own client, using a Raspberry Pi to do the traffic encryption for him. While the developer admits that loading a toot is a slow process, it’s absolutely incredible that such an early Apple computer can do this at all.
Amidon (Commodore Amiga)
Amiga fans rejoice! MiDWaN from Blitter Studio put in a lot of legwork to develop a native AmigaOS client for interacting with the fediverse. The developer has indicated that the client has some quirks with HTMLview with various versions of AmigaOS and the MUI toolkit, and has expressed a desire to migrate away from it due to how different toolkit versions handle that component.
Masto9 (9Front)
Julien Blanchard decided to go the extra mile by making a client for 9Front, a fork of the long-lived Plan9 Operating System. Much like the OS itself, it’s not exactly pretty…but, the client undeniably makes up for that in functionality.
BREXXTODON (IBM System/370)
Yes, you read that right! Soldier of Fortran made a client for MVS 3.8J, a system that can run on the IBM System/370 mainframe. These computers were primarily developed and sold during the 1970’s, making this perhaps the oldest architecture a Mastodon client has been developed for so far!
MOStodon (Commodore64)
Havoc over at OldBytes is in the process of building out MOStodon, his own fully-featured Commodore64 client for Mastodon. The code hasn’t been released yet, because he wants to put in just a few more essential features, but we’ll update this space once that happens.
FujiNet Mastodon Client (Various )
Making up the end of this list is a super-minimal client to showcase the capabilities of FujiNet, a hardware extension that can help bring vintage computers onto the modern Internet. The project includes the same client ported to: Coleco ADAM, Apple II, Commodore 64, Commodore Plus4, and the Commodore VIC-20.
They’re very, very simple applications, but provide the basis for retro hackers to develop richer clients down the road.
FujiNet works on Atari 8bit too
@mike Brilliant, great to see this!
@mike A small light in me hoped that there would be something, anything that would run on my Nokia 9300.But it’s great to see that people made these clients for so many old and loved systems! Thanks for the compilation.
@steeph I expect it could be done. I don’t know how, but I’m sure someone does.
@mike I really like the look of DOStodon and Macstodon I’ve even still got our old Commodore 64
now lets wait for someone to make a mastodon client for old browsers