Yarn Desktop Client
I felt that I needed a new ‘home’ for social media when I shut down gnusocial \ diaspora instances I was running. I spent some time looking around. I have to admit I do not like the whole ‘web3’ stuff (nostr for example) and others, mostly because it attracts so many cryptobro’s, and I get tired of the constant shilling they do. I do not mind crypto - I use it a lot my self, but I do not need to be reminded about it on almost every post I see on social media.
So, after looking into things I landed on Yarn - https://yarn.social/ , you can join a instance, or just host your own. I started out by joining twtxt insance, but then I decided to host my own, which has been working great. Easy to use, easy to compile from source and very easy to host your own. I also really like how portable it is, it’s just a textfile containing your data, so you can easily move it – or convert it to some other service later on if you want.
After using it for a while I really wanted a desktop client, so I spent some time thinking about it, and then I checked out how to work with yarn from c++. I initially wanted to make it in rust, but I decided to abandon that and go for what I know best - c++. I posted a comment about that on twitter, and it became the most viewed \ commented tweet I’ve ever made. Was a crazy weekend when I posted my tweet.
The desktop client is on GitHub ( https://github.com/stig-atle/YarnDesktopClient ), for anyone to use and try, It uses gtk4 as GUI, initially I went for FLTK, but there where some things in there that was a pain in the ass to work around, so I switched from FLTK to GTK4, and I have to say - GTK4 is really nice to work with, easy to figure out the things you need, and I’m glad I switched to it.
The build instructions are on GitHub if you want to give it a try.
The software is work in progress, but has a lot of features already. And I have limited time to work on it (full time job, family, Alaskan husky) fills up a lot of my free time, but I try to add new features as I move a long, and I do use the software all the time when I’m on my computer, so I do eat my own dog food.
Also - it shows you how you can easily interact with yarn from c++ (by using libcurl), which can be nice if you have a project in mind that you need to get up and running quickly.
If you decide to try Yarn (and then possibly the desktop client) then you can find me and follow me here: https://yarn.stigatle.no/user/stigatle/ Or if you are on mastodon or something like that (activitypub) – feel free to follow me by adding ‘@stigatle@activitypub.stigatle.no’.