Extending Mastodon

I've been using Mastodon more over the last month, especially since Twitter killed off third-party apps like Talon, the Android client that was my primary interface to Twitter. I still look at Twitter to follow a handful of accounts for information about COVID-19 and the Ukraine invasion, but the limitations of the official Twitter app and web interface make it difficult to use.

The official Android app and web client for Mastodon lack features that I used on Twitter. However, Mastodon, its API, and Activity Pub, its core protocol, are open source, so people have been busily extending it with new clients and add-on tools. 

Here are a few that are useful.

• Fedilab is the Android client that I currently use. I like it because it has one key feature lacking in the official Mastodon client. I can mute users who I've added to lists so they don't show up in my Home feed. 
• Mastodon List Manager is a "dead simple manager for all of your Mastodon Lists, letting you quickly assign people that you are following to one or more lists. Search, filter, and organize your follow list to make reasoning about your lists easy." Coupled with the muting feature in Fedilab, it makes lists much more useful.
• Mastodon Threaded Reply Viewer is a simple web app that shows all of your posts and lets you view replies in a threaded format. It's handy but would be even better if it indicated which posts have replies. (You can view all of your posts (including boosts) in the Mastodon web app with a URL in this format: https://[your host]/@[your username], but the viewer is easier to use. 

Finally, for those who are more technically adept, here's an article that shows how you can extend the Mastodon dashboard to show you your followers, the lists they belong to, and their recent posts. At the end of the article, there's a list of links to a series of articles about extending Mastodon to do new and interesting things.