Share Mastodon posts better

How does this work?

It seems like Apple made a special case for displaying tweets in the Messages interface. This tool takes your Mastodon post URL, pretends it's from a Twitter URL for the purposes of showing the special tweet UI, and then forwards all navigation to the original post. Your group chats will never be the same.

Update! Here's the PHP code that does this.

What if Apple makes Mastodon posts look better in the future?

Then I will be the happiest! Please Sherlock me, Tim. (And if I have anyone's ear: tailoring a page's link preview presentation by special meta tags would be chefskiss.gif.)

Update! On February 16, 2023, the first beta of iOS 16.4 was released and includes native Mastodon link previewing! The update became available to the public on March 27, 2023. I'll leave this running as long as possible to preserve previously shared links (and because users need to update to 16.4), but I'll personally stop using it. 👋🏼

Can Mastodon add something to do this by default?

Good question. I believe the project is aware of Apple’s special-handling of Twitter links, but it requires pretending to be a Twitter URL which may have other adverse effects and would be semantically inaccurate. So technically, yes, but I wouldn't expect them to.

My link doesn't work.

That's not a question, but sorry about that. Mastodon's strength is its federated nature that can live on many different instances. I tested on the most common ones, but certain flavors may not be compatible with this tool.

Are you just passing the full Mastodon URL to the `to` query param, like mstdn.link?to={some url}?

Yep, you're on to me. You can manually build the URLs if you'd like, but the text input field above and the Shortcut linked above do it for you.

Can I ask you more questions?

Sure, feel free to reach me at @thillsman@mastodon.social