Follow Toots - Configuration

A Bookmarklet for Improved Usability

This application is not integrated in mastodon clients. That is, those clients do not provide links or buttons to follow a toot in this application here. To provide you with a comfortable way of following toots nevertheless, you can set up a "bookmarklet" in your browser, that is, a bookmark whose address consists of JavaScript code.

Create a bookmark with a name such as "follow" and fill its address field with the following code:

Note:
Whenever you use somebody's code (such as this code here) in a bookmarklet, read it carefully and check that it's harmless. Otherwise you're exposing yourself to a security risk.
(And if you used the "Copy" button, make sure that it has really copied the displayed code to the clipboard, not something malicious.)

Then clicking this bookmarklet will take you from a mastodon toot to a page following the replies to that toot. Note that you have to be on a page for a particular toot (not on your home feed, some profile page, or ...). If you are not on a page for a specific toot, the opened toot-following page will display an error message.

You can use the bookmarklet from plain mastodon clients, from phanpy.social or from elk.zone.

If you always use the bookmarklet to add new trees and never the URL input at the bottom of the overview page, you might find the latter distracting. You can hide it by checking the following checkbox:

Hide URL input

Show Toot and Profile Links

If some of the boxes below are checked, toot menus will be enriched with links to the toot or to the author's profile. Links can point to plain mastodon or to some specific frontends.

Authentication Using Access Tokens

First of all: You can use this application without authenticating at mastodon instances. But there are situations where it might make sense to authenticate:

If you want to see toots with restricted visibility.
If you want to follow a toot with more than 60 descendants. (Mastodon reports at most 60 descendants to unauthenticated users. There is also a limit for the number of reported ancestors, but that is rarely hit.)
If you have participated in polls and want to see your own votes.
If you want to see your relationships (following, muting, ...) to other users participating in a conversation.

To enable authentication, add a line for each relevant instance to the table below. Usually you will need authentication only for a single instance, namely the one you are using. It does not matter from which instance the toots were sent as long as they are available on your instance.

To get an access token enter the name of your instance into the instance-input field below and click the "Acquire" button. (Leave the token-input field empty.) It will take you to the authorization page of your instance. There you can authorize this app to read toots ("posts") on your behalf. You will come back to this page here

Authorization for development

Mastodon also provides a way to get access tokens for development purposes.

Go to https://<your instance>/settings/applications and click the "New application" button. (I assume that you are already logged in.)

On the page that opens, fill in the fields:

The application name might be something like "Follow Toots Dev". This is for you to recognize the token later, e.g., if you want to revoke it.
You may enter as the application website as a reminder.
Leave the "Redirect URI" field unchanged. (urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob)
Check read:statuses, read:follows, and read:accounts. Uncheck all other scopes. ("Status" is the technical term for "toot".)
Press the submit button at the bottom of the page.

Now you see a list of applications for which you have created access tokens. Click the newly created one.

The page that opens lets you edit the values you have provided. But we are only interested in the field "Your access token". Use this value as the token for your instance.

Finally, if you trust this web application here not to abuse the access to your mastodon account (read-only and limited to toots), copy the instance name and the access token to the input fields at the bottom of the table and press the "Save" button.

More remarks:

Tokens will be used as soon as you add or reload trees from the respective instances.
The access tokens will be stored persistently in your browser. Remove them if you want to make sure that they cannot be abused. You can also invalidate tokens in the settings of your mastodon account.