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.
