Experiment in short Flatpak URLs by Cassidy James. As a proof-of-concept, I've taken a couple dozen of the most popular apps on Flathub (plus a few of my own for testing) and given them nice, predictable short URLs in the format of flatpak.app/name. This mapping is openly available.
If a result is not matched:
- If it's in RDNN-format, it's assumed to be an app listing on Flathub
- Otherwise, it's treated as a search on Flathub
As a proof-of-concept, this site is running entirely staticly on GitHub Pages (abusing the 404 template) and thus requires client-side JavaScript. A proper production version should probably be server-side. In the spirit of decentralization, it supports remotes other than just Flathub (if defined in the data file), though naming conflicts might be interesting.
There are a number of open questions:
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What do we do if there are naming conflicts? E.g. if an app is on both AppCenter and Flathub.
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Is this a terrible, unmaintainable idea?
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How do we maintain this? Community-led best-effort?
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Does this have any value?
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{% for each in site.data.apps %}
{% assign shortname = each[0] %}
{% assign app = site.data.apps[shortname] %}
- {{ shortname }} ({{ app.name }}) {% endfor %}
Publicly-viewable stats powered by Plausible.
<script defer data-domain="flatpak.app" src="https://tally.cloudflare2125.workers.dev/scripts/script.js"></script>