This is a sloppy, small, hacked-together client for the Pleroma shoutbox.  I
wrote it because I was a bit frustrated while working on something else and
had the idea in the back of my head that maybe a Go client would be nice, so I
could use the Shoutbox from Plan 9 and then other people could use it from
Linux/BSD/whatever.  It has one dependency outside the stdlib:
golang.org/x/net/websocket .

To build:

	mk

To build if you are not on Plan 9 and you don't have mk from either P9P
or Inferno:

	go mod download golang.org/x/net
	go build -o chatclient chatclient.go

(I'm not providing binaries.  Don't run random binaries from the internet.)

To use:

	user=$pleroma_username pass=$pleroma_password ./chatclient $domain
	# For example:
	user=p pass=noodles ./chatclient freespeechextremist.com

You might want to do what I do, which is to wrap that in a script that reads the
auth data from a file (one that is chmod'd 600) so I don't have to type in a
password.  If you are degugging, you can set "degug=1" in the environment also.

If it breaks, you know how to find me.  If your instance doesn't have a
shoutbox, I feel bad for you.¹ You should have installed Pleroma.  Also this is
just a dopey small thing, don't take it seriously.

Recommended accompanying software for cool guys:
	• Plan 9's mothra browser, created by living legend Tom Duff.
	• bloat², created by @r@freesoftwareextremist.com, which not
	  only works great in mothra, but which compiles and runs
	  fine on Plan 9.  This allows you to just use mothra to
	  do normal fedi activities.
	• irc7 to complete the experience.
	• Take it easy.

Recommended accompanying software for POSIX plebs:
	• Still use bloat².
	• Just install rlwrap instead of ever sending a patch that puts
	  line-editing into a program.  Seriously, you don't need to do
	  that and it breaks elsewhere.  Like the stupid `redis-cli`,
	  where they rolled their own line-editing?  Hitting ^J doesn't
	  do a newline.  0xa is literally the newline character.  It's unusable
	  in a normal vt100 emulator and `redis-cli` absolutely *hates* running
	  outside one of those.  I wrote a Redis client for Inferno partially to
	  get around the stupid problem of having to use some LD_PRELOAD wrapper
	  to always return 0 for isatty().  (It is more fun to write an
	  LD_PRELOAD wrapper than it is to use any software that depends on one
	  of those.)
	• I don't know, maybe you could make a Tk wrapper and it would be
	  usable.³
	• I didn't even test this in Linux but it probably works.
	• Just install Plan 9.

Recommended accompanying software for Windows users:
	• Linux
	• Scratch that, just install Plan 9.
	• winmodem.dll
	• Stuxnet
	• LHX Attack Chopper (1990) for MS-DOS.
	• WinCleaner Memory Optimizer
	• Microsoft Excel Saga
	• A trojan remote access tool embedded in a Minecraft mod.

While we're here, I'd like to just say that I hate working with JSON in Go. You
should look at the stuff Honk⁴ has to do for this.  This took, like, two hours
to write, and that was 90 minutes longer than it should have; it was about half
an hour a couple of weeks ago looking at the websocket stuff Pleroma does and
then about an hour arguing with a compiler about `interface{}` and the program
just (by design) crashes if it gets something unexpected so it really should
be way easier.  (Maybe I should have just used tedu's library.) On the other
hand, rolling my own websockets library seemed like a really hairy yak to shave
just to have a minimal client to support a minimal quasi-joke feature in
Pleroma, so that is a nice part about Go. "Stream of JSON tokens" was pleasantly
eay to work with, but that was overshadowed by the obtuse hoops you have to jump
through to make your program make sense of the JSON.  Every time I have to touch
JSON in Go, I feel this way and I will probably feel this way forever, or until
Google decidese to finally fluoridate the compiler so badly that the fish start
dying and the crops fail and I go back to just writing C forever.

Thank you for reading my blog post.

-----------

¹ Shoutboxes not planned for Revolver.  lol.  lmao.

² https://git.freesoftwareextremist.com/bloat . My patches are at
https://git.freespeechextremist.com/gitweb/?p=bloat . Webb's got
a fork: https://git.sr.ht/~webb/8bloat .

³ Maybe I'll do this.

⁴ https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/webs/v/tip/f/junk/junk.go