Provide support for standalone publication of a Mastodon archive

[juandesant]

I am trying to publish my archive of Mastodon posts in the same way I have published my Twitter archives, and MARL seems like the ideal tool, but there is no way to set it up for immediate opening of an archive, but maybe it could be possible to pre-process the data so that it could work…

A couple of links that might be relevant:

• Simple Twitter Archiver tool: https://tinysubversions.com/twitter-archive/make-your-own/
• Gitlab Pages deployment with my tweets based on it: http://juandesant.gitlab.io/my-twitter-archive

Or maybe you know about something similar for Mastodon?

[s427]

Thanks for the suggestion. While I did not think of this use case, I can definitely see the appeal. Right now this is not possible, as MARL is built to run exclusively based on local files. There is no server-side logic whatsoever —in fact MARL can work completely offline, as no data is sent over the network.

To turn it into a publishing tool would require to add some server side logic: the question for me is whether this can be done in a lightweight way, without compromising the way MARL currently work (meaning the ability to work offline and purely based on local files). If think it's possible but I would have to think about it more carefully.

[s427]

There you go. :) Latest version introduces "server mode" which allows to use MARL as a publishing tool. Please read the "server-mode.md" documentation file for more information.

Server mode can also be used on a local web server, which can be useful for several reasons:

• allows MARL to load very large archives without choking on the browser cache limitation;
• automatically load your archive(s) when opening MARL.

[juandesant]

Thank you! Adding a link to server-mode.md for everyone's convenience!