Follow Toot

Help for the "Tree" Page

Primary Functionality

If you "follow" a toot, this page displays

• the toots to which the followed toot is a (direct or indirect) reply (if any),
• the followed toot itself, and
• the (direct and indirect) replies to the followed toot.

The Tree checkbox allows you to switch between a hierarchical and a (purely chronological) flat layout of the replies.

Each toot has a checkbox, which you can use to tell the app that you have seen the toot. By default the contents of seen toots will be hidden ("collapsed"). But you can change that behavior with the Collapse menu, selecting whether no toots/only seen toots/all toots should be collapsed.

More on the Page Header

The header contains the following lines (below a list of links to other pages and the page title):

• Information about the author of the followed toot and the mastodon instance from where the toots are fetched.
• Some dates: the date of the oldest and the newest toot on the page, as well as the last time you fetched the toot data. (Note that there is, at least for now, no automatic downloading of new or edited toots.)
• Some statistics about toots and users (discussion participants). Hover over a user icon to see the name. If you are authenticated (see the configuration page), users with whom you have some relationship (following in either direction, muting, ...) will be highlighted.
• The last line contains the following items (partly in a ☰ menu):
  • The Help button to open this info box.
  • The Tree checkbox and the Collapse menu as described above.
  • Buttons for marking all toots on the page as seen or unseen, respectively.
  • A button for reloading the toots for this page so that you get new and edited toots. It is often a good idea to mark all toots as seen before reloading. This way you quickly recognize any new toots you have not yet seen.
  • A button for unfollowing the followed toot of this page. This will also delete information about seen toots on this page. (Note that this web app lets your browser store followed toots and the set of seen toots on the respective pages. So this information survives closing and re-opening the page or even a brower restart. It will be removed when you unfollow the toot.)

More on Toots

Each toot is displayed as a header with some metadata and a body with the toot's content. The latter may be hidden ("collapsed") as described above.

The ☰ menu of a toot can also be opened by right-clicking anywhere on the toot with the Control key held down.

• The first few items (for toggling the "seen" status of the toot and for navigating across the toots on the page) also display the keyboard keys to invoke the actions.
  You can also toggle the "seen" state by double-clicking a toot.
• If you have checked some boxes in the configuration page, there will be links to the toot or the account in some mastodon clients.
• A button to copy a link to this toot within this page.

The toot header also provides counts of boosts (B), favorings (F), quotes (Q) and replies (R). Boosts and favorings can be clicked to get more information.

If a toot has been edited, the creation date wil be struck out and the date of the last edit will also be displayed.

Finally: This is (for now) a read-only application. You cannot manipulate any data on mastodon instances. That is, you cannot reply, quote, favor, bnookmark, boost or edit a toot. Similarly, you cannot follow, mute, ... an account. Use the links to other mastodon clients and manipulate toots from there. On the longer run, I would like to have the functionality of this application integrated in a full-fledged mastodon app.