It’s a shame that over the years the account integration that was so great in Maemo and Meego has been eroded. Since the launch of SailfishOS with the big tech companies closing off their formerly public web APIs - some of them had to be removed even before launch. The last straw was Twitter (or whatever it’s called now) closing itself off a while ago, which made my events view look sadly empty.
Mastodon is a bit like Twitter, but it’s federated so there are no API keys to block and no single domain to cut off, and there are a lot of cool people on there including many from this community and the wider mobile Linux world. Tooter is great, but you still have to open it. It’s missing that healthy ever presence that is always in your face reminding you that it’s there so you can never forget about it.
So I made a Mastodon account integration plugin for SailfishOS. You add your account from the Settings app, like with Nextcloud etc. Log in, and your Events view will get a Posts section like it did with Twitter (or VK? never used that myself) before. The differences are:
- You can long-press a post to open an interaction menu to directly favourite, re-blog or share a post.
- You can share videos and text notes, as well as photos.
- No nazis
It’s not intended to be a full client like Tooter - the intention is that those can associate themselves with your home server domain links and then your posts open with them instead of a browser. It’s beta, and not official at all, on either the Mastodon nor the Jolla side. But hopefully one day it will, and the internet and phones can be a little bit more like we were promised they would be.
The source isn’t public yet - there’s some refactoring that still needs to be done, and I’d like everything involved to be in the open so it can be a full example on how to do social feeds. But the aim is for it to be open source as soon as possible.
Update: v1.0.1 with minor bugfixes:
- Single auth service so notifications and sharing keep working if posts are turned off (thanks to poetaster for noticing that one)
- Restart msyncd on install so reboot isn’t necessary to see the posts on first install.
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Nice addition, thank you a lot.
I observe that it is not possible to remove posts from the event view. Remove notifications does work.
Is it possible to control the notification sound seperately from other notifications?
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Installed and working! Thx. Only issue so far is if, in the events feed, you click on a mastdon post it opens the browser and takes you to mastodon.social, but then all you get is a 404 page not found.
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Same happens if you go to the bottom of the list of posts and click “Show more in Mastodon”
Is mastodon.social your home server? It is mine and it’s set as the default so I worry it might be used too often. If so, then you’ll have to log into it on the browser too I’m afraid.
For me it takes me to the log in site of my mastodon server
Wouldn’t it be super cool, if it could open toots in tooter?!
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That would be a feature request for tooter
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The not removing posts thing is by design. That’s what the twitter feed did too - it’s just supposed to be your ten latest tweets. When you say control the notification sound, do you mean change the sound played or turn it off completely?
Oh yes, I see. I had to separately go into tne browser and logon. Now it works. Maybe add that to the instructions? I kind of thought that if it needed me to login on the browser it would have asked me to before giving a 404 error.
And yes, mastodon.social is my home server.
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I honestly don’t remember how twitter worked on SFOS … It was so long ago now. I used to use it as a news feed. Being from the UK I simply follwed BBC news on twitter. Its really nice to get that functionality back again via Mastodon, so many thanks!
On the removing notifications thing, I too think it might be nice to be able to ‘clear down’ the Mastodon notifications. When I’ve seen the posts, I don’t need to see them again. Better to see new ones, rather than have to scroll down to see which ones I can ignore (because I’ve already seen or actioned them), and which ones are new. Perhaps it could be an option?
I would rather turn it off
This is brilliant, many thanks !
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Yeah that’s a bit beyond what this could do, but we should do some finer control on SFOS notifications in general at some point. But in the meantime you can disable the notifications in the account settings if you don’t want them.
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Agreed, thank you Andrew!!
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@abranson Thank you for great integration.
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I wonder how this (opening Tooter) could work technically.
Basically what you have is just a https link. There’s no way to tell that there’s a Mastodon instance at the end of it, is there?
So how could ‘the system’ know to open it with Tooter especially?
While there’s the feature to associate an app with a https hostname, for Mastodon it would require a list of all instances, which is not only infeasible, but impossible to generate…
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Maybe a pseudo protocoll or hostname can be generatet that is resolved by tooter if activated in the settings of the plugin (“Open posts in local mastodon client”).
Origin Link: https://mastodon.social/link/to/post
Plugin links as: msdn://mastodon.social/link/to/post or if only hostnames woukd work: https://mtdn-translate.linkpass/link?mastodon.social/link/to/post
Just as a rough example. In tooter both might be resolved correctly to the post, couldn’t it?
The easiest way would be to write a new desktop file at runtime after the user logs in and you know the homeserver. All of the links coming from this plugin point to that through the mastodon authorize_interaction thing, as otherwise you’d have to log into every instance you visited. I thought this was trivial, until I realized that SailJail won’t show Tooter that directory. It’s probably easiest to find some way to do that though, though harbour compliance is another matter.
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