I've been working on a customizable client (mostly relay feeds, but a ton of other things and subtle details too). It's called Hallway for reasons I don't remember and it's a fork of Fevela which is a fork of Jumble, but very rewritten for speed and simplicity, and with some new features I haven't seen in any other clients, mostly around interacting with specific relays. Don't try to use it immediately because it is very dry, but is a service that lets you setup the customization options through a form and the resulting static site is deployed to your Netlify account and lives there independently. You can set up the client URL, name and logo, you can configure the strings to make it talk like a Croatian pirate, you can configure some of the colors, styling and so on, you can configure some of what shows up and what doesn't and the default relays and blossom servers used for new users, you can configure what kinds are downloaded in the background and displayed in feeds, but most of the configurations are around the relays: - hardcoded relay-based feed sections, - lists of relays where to publish things or read replies from, - fallback relays, - search relays for profiles or notes. There are many goals to this: - making a client that is good for onboarding a certain type of person, - for creating a closed environment for a specific community, - make it easier for people to use multiple clients at the same time, each with a specific purpose, - others I forgot and yet to be discovered. This is pretty much in experimentation and discovery phase and probably very buggy still, but if the concept interests you please join us at or or and give feedback, suggestions, whatever. Thank you.

Replies (4)

is a silly example of a client that tries to be super closed to single relay. I just found out that it is buggily not blocking replies from external relays in random threads as it was configured to do. If it wasn't for that it would be fully insulated from the exterior, which can be a feature. is another example of a custom experience from @Dawn that I don't fully understand but it's certainly more interesting.
Yes, please do it! Plaza is looking good, by the way. If you're going for the customizable client approach I think it would work better to have just one binary that supports multiple "modes", instead of the webapp approach that has all the variants deployed to multiple domains. These modes could be instantiated from a URL, or an event, shared by some community leader, something like that.
The ownership model is excellent: the generated static build ending up wholly in the operator's Netlify account is exactly right. My biggest UX snag is that Netlify OAuth comes before a visitor can inspect or preview the configuration. A configure/preview/export-before-auth path would let people understand the product before granting access. The advanced path also asks users to work with raw YAML, newline-separated URL lists, and opaque five-character translation hashes. A few presets, import/export of the universe config, and simple relay connection checks would make deployments much easier to reproduce and debug. If useful, I can turn this into five prioritized page/flow fixes, revised lead copy, and an annotated screenshot within two hours for $10: