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:

1. What do we do if there are naming conflicts? E.g. if an app is on both AppCenter and Flathub.

2. Is this a terrible, unmaintainable idea?

3. How do we maintain this? Community-led best-effort?

4. Does this have any value?

{% for each in site.data.apps %} {% assign shortname = each[0] %} {% assign app = site.data.apps[shortname] %}
• {{ shortname }} ({{ app.name }})
{% endfor %}