Elk is a nimble Mastodon client with great attention to user experience, boasting features such as being an installable Progressive Web App (PWA), support for code blocks with syntax highlighting, chronological threading, and markdown formatting.

Started by core maintainers behind popular developer tooling in the Vue/Vite/Nuxt ecosystem in 2022, it attracted hundreds of contributors and resulted to the creation of new libraries now widely used in other projects.

In this talk, I will give a brief history of Elk development from the perspective of a contributor who has never written a Vue component (before Elk), a walkthrough of key strengths of the technology under the hood, and a look forward to the future of the project.