Paper isn’t a mod loader, it uses Fabric under the hood. Also, what makes you think it’s the most popular server? I thought it was fading. I switched my server from Paper to Fabric years ago.
It doesn't use Fabric under the hood, where did you hear that?
> Also, what makes you think it’s the most popular server?
Because it's the only server software that can actually scale and support a long-term server with feature and bugfix stability. Its popularity bears out in what hosting companies say people are most commonly using. Though I'm not sure if there is a specific publicly published statistic to point to to prove this - there is bStats global stats, but it is biased towards the Paper ecosystem.
Fabric is getting close with certain optimization and bugfixing mods, but it's still not there. Paper has a checklist of what optimizations and fixes must be included for a release to proceed, whereas Fabric ecosystem is still a hodgepodge of different things that are only available on specific Minecraft versions.
I've recently been setting up a velocity server network for some friends and friends of friends, and I agree with your findings. I don't have much history on Forge vs Paper vs Fabric vs..... (and found it all very overwhelming, honestly) but from what I can tell, the popular sites like modrinth have communities way more focused around Forge/NeoForge.
Paper does seem to have it's own site for plugins, hangar or something? (Don't have my web history on this PC) but the community support doesn't seem nearly as fleshed out.
It is incredible though, before 1.21 the last time I played around with MC server hosting was probably around 1.8 days, when it seemed like you only had Bukkit and a few plugins for it
Paper is custom server software and could be easily argued to be a mod loader if you consider plugins to be mods (although it’s probably a weak argument since there’s no mixin support built-in, although some large servers have added mixin support to their own Paper forks). However, it does not use Fabric under the hood (it’s based on Bukkit/CraftBukkit). By playercount, it is the largest (custom, standalone) MC server software in the world.
I tend to think the distinction between "plugins" and "server-side mods" is a little pointless these days. I would consider something a "mod" if it's in an environment where it can deeply touch Mojang code and completely transform it if needed. And before we ever had Fabric/Sponge mixins, we had reflection and ASM for doing just this. We still have that, and a lot of Paper plugins make extensive use of reflection - particularly libraries that reflect into netty to hook directly into the protocol are quite common.
You’re right, my bad, Spigot (from Bukkit), not Fabric. I got the impression it’s actually using ~~Fabric~~ Spigot code for this because you’re using plugins compiled for Spigot and both a paper.whatever and spigot.whatever config file, but after looking it up I see that they forked it.
I’m not really clear on mod vs plugin vs mixin, I was just trying to refer to whatever software does the decompilation work rather than just consuming APIs provided by projects that do.
Sounds like it’s correct that Paper didn’t do its own mod API, but incorrect that Paper doesn’t do its own decompilation work.
> By playercount, it is the largest (custom, standalone) MC server software in the world.
Do you have a source on this? Not trying to accuse you of anything, I just know that a few servers claim this, and don’t know if we have reliable numbers.
Paper isn’t a mod loader, it uses Fabric under the hood. Also, what makes you think it’s the most popular server? I thought it was fading. I switched my server from Paper to Fabric years ago.
It doesn't use Fabric under the hood, where did you hear that?
> Also, what makes you think it’s the most popular server?
Because it's the only server software that can actually scale and support a long-term server with feature and bugfix stability. Its popularity bears out in what hosting companies say people are most commonly using. Though I'm not sure if there is a specific publicly published statistic to point to to prove this - there is bStats global stats, but it is biased towards the Paper ecosystem.
Fabric is getting close with certain optimization and bugfixing mods, but it's still not there. Paper has a checklist of what optimizations and fixes must be included for a release to proceed, whereas Fabric ecosystem is still a hodgepodge of different things that are only available on specific Minecraft versions.
I've recently been setting up a velocity server network for some friends and friends of friends, and I agree with your findings. I don't have much history on Forge vs Paper vs Fabric vs..... (and found it all very overwhelming, honestly) but from what I can tell, the popular sites like modrinth have communities way more focused around Forge/NeoForge.
Paper does seem to have it's own site for plugins, hangar or something? (Don't have my web history on this PC) but the community support doesn't seem nearly as fleshed out.
It is incredible though, before 1.21 the last time I played around with MC server hosting was probably around 1.8 days, when it seemed like you only had Bukkit and a few plugins for it
Paper is custom server software and could be easily argued to be a mod loader if you consider plugins to be mods (although it’s probably a weak argument since there’s no mixin support built-in, although some large servers have added mixin support to their own Paper forks). However, it does not use Fabric under the hood (it’s based on Bukkit/CraftBukkit). By playercount, it is the largest (custom, standalone) MC server software in the world.
I tend to think the distinction between "plugins" and "server-side mods" is a little pointless these days. I would consider something a "mod" if it's in an environment where it can deeply touch Mojang code and completely transform it if needed. And before we ever had Fabric/Sponge mixins, we had reflection and ASM for doing just this. We still have that, and a lot of Paper plugins make extensive use of reflection - particularly libraries that reflect into netty to hook directly into the protocol are quite common.
You’re right, my bad, Spigot (from Bukkit), not Fabric. I got the impression it’s actually using ~~Fabric~~ Spigot code for this because you’re using plugins compiled for Spigot and both a paper.whatever and spigot.whatever config file, but after looking it up I see that they forked it.
I’m not really clear on mod vs plugin vs mixin, I was just trying to refer to whatever software does the decompilation work rather than just consuming APIs provided by projects that do.
Sounds like it’s correct that Paper didn’t do its own mod API, but incorrect that Paper doesn’t do its own decompilation work.
> By playercount, it is the largest (custom, standalone) MC server software in the world.
Do you have a source on this? Not trying to accuse you of anything, I just know that a few servers claim this, and don’t know if we have reliable numbers.