Mastodon is an alternative social media platform to Twitter. The posts you make to Mastodon are known as 'toots' and can be up-to 500 characters long. You can include words, pictures, links or video clips.
What’s nice about Mastodon is that it presents a TweetDeck style user interface of multiple columns, a chronological timeline of ‘toots’, no advertising or promoted content, no nasty tracking and mostly a higher user intellect. Scheduled posting is supported and toots can include basic content like images, video clips and links - potentially making this platform appealing to micro bloggers. Mobile apps exist too.
Most people joining Mastodon for the first time signup to the mastodon.social instance. Anybody can create and host their own instance of the Mastodon software, but lots of people prefer to join an existing instance. This open source and distributed approach means Mastodon has a strong future. It is not a platform owned by anyone particular private individual or company - at risk of being taken over or shutdown.
If you are new to Mastodon, you can probably find lots of informative tutorials online, like on YouTube. Feel free to friend me too!
What’s nice about Mastodon is that it presents a TweetDeck style user interface of multiple columns, a chronological timeline of ‘toots’, no advertising or promoted content, no nasty tracking and mostly a higher user intellect. Scheduled posting is supported and toots can include basic content like images, video clips and links - potentially making this platform appealing to micro bloggers. Mobile apps exist too.
Most people joining Mastodon for the first time signup to the mastodon.social instance. Anybody can create and host their own instance of the Mastodon software, but lots of people prefer to join an existing instance. This open source and distributed approach means Mastodon has a strong future. It is not a platform owned by anyone particular private individual or company - at risk of being taken over or shutdown.
If you are new to Mastodon, you can probably find lots of informative tutorials online, like on YouTube. Feel free to friend me too!
Example
This is a real working example of the MastoStack. The number of 'toots' was set to 10 and the embed has a maximum height of the embed has been set to 800px.Setup
MastoStack is treated as an 'app' and therefore you need an API key to use this stack. Generating a new API is is very simple. There is either an automated tool you can use or a more manual approach, depending on what you are more comfortable using.The automatic tool
Point your web browser to http://www.azet.jp/mastodon.wizard/wizard_en.html and follow the onscreen steps. Most of the information asked for (like your instance name and user name) is information already available in your Mastodon account preferences. On the last step of the wizard, take a look in the generated code box. Make a note of the access_token and account_id values. Take these and enter them in the MastoStack settings
Manually generating an API key
- Go to your Mastodon page (in a desktop web browser).
- Click on the 'cog' icon next to your name, to open your preferences
- Click on the Development tab
- Click on the Your Applications tab
- Fill in the form fields with the name of your application (e.g. 'RapidWeaver MastoStack') and your website address. In the Scopes area, just enable 'read' and leave everything else unchecked. Click Submit when done.
- On the resulting page, click your application name. Make a note of the Access Token (a long string of letters and numbers).
The Access Token is pasted into your MastoStack settings. It will be a long string of letters or numbers like this:
d8bca49d7e80be31aafe763fc90ea8f969adfc4daeaf01284908077066deb1d0One other piece of information you need is your Account ID. This is a numerical value (not your @username). The easiest way to get this is to go to your Mastodon webpage (e.g. https://mastodon.social/@my_username). In the top-left (when you normally compose a new 'toot') click on your @handle link, as indicated in the picture below.
You should see the page URL change to something like this:
https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/224910That number shown at the end of the link is your Mastodon Account ID number. In this example it would be 224910.
Another way to get your account ID is to go to your Mastodon webpage. View the page source code in your web browser. CMD + F to search the page for
https://mastodon.social/api/salmon/Now whatever number is shown after the
https://mastodon.social/api/salmon/ URL is your numerical account ID, to use in the MastoStack settings.Mastodon website verification
Mastodon now lets users self-verify ownership of domains listed in profiles. This means you can prove you are the owner of a website. To do so, go to Preferences > Profile > Appearance > Verification, on the Mastodon website. Copy the verification code shown and paste it anywhere inside a RapidWeaver content, sidebar or footer region.If you prefer to keep your verification link hidden and want to verify a page MastoStack is published on, starting in MastoStack 1.1.0, open the MastoStack settings and check the Verify This Web Page setting. In the box shown, you can paste in your Mastodon verification code. No link will get shown in the web page, but the verification link will be embedded in the page source code for Mastodon to find.
