Visualize a Mastodon thread tree

An experiment inspired by Colin Wright's Chartodon.

demo (video; 20 seconds)

Cons:

• Doesn't run in a browser. You need to install several small, reputable Lua tools.
• Not as pretty as Chartodon.
• Might not work on Windows. Please report your experience if you try it.

Pros:

• Use keyboard shortcuts to browse the graph.
  • ctrl+up to parent
  • ctrl+down to first child
  • ctrl+left to previous sibling
  • ctrl+right to next sibling
• Much easier to modify to your needs than a web browser. You can modify it while it's running (see below).

This repo is an example of a Freewheeling App, designed above all to be easy to run, easy to modify and easy to share.

Getting started (LÖVE v11)

Install the Lua programming language. Just a 200KB download, open source and with a stellar reputation. I'll assume below that you can invoke it using the lua command, but that might vary depending on your OS.

Install the luasec library for https access. One way to accomplish this is to install the LuaRocks package manager and then:

$ luarocks install luasec

(I haven't been able yet to install luarocks+luasec on Windows 11.)

Install the LÖVE game engine. It's just a 5MB download, open-source and extremely well-behaved. I'll assume below that you can invoke it using the love command, but that might vary depending on your OS.

Run unfurl.lua from this directory, passing in a link to some toot. For example:

lua unfurl.lua https://merveilles.town/@akkartik/108773157588384635

unfurl.lua will make some Mastodon API requests before passing the results to LÖVE.

Click on any toot to copy its URL to the clipboard.

Getting started (LÖVE v12 pre-release)

Install LÖVE from a nightly build.

• Go to https://github.com/love2d/love/actions
• Click on the most recent successful build (with a green check mark before it)
• Scroll down to the "Artifacts" section
• Download the artifact for your OS
  • If you don't have a Github account, these won't be clickable. Copy the URL for the build and paste it into https://nightly.link to get clickable links to artifacts.

Run LÖVE from the commandline and pass in this directory. Optionally also pass in a link to a Mastodon toot.

Copy a link to any mastodon toot and paste it into the app window using ctrl+v to view it in the context of its thread.

Click on any toot to copy its URL to the clipboard.

Hacking

To modify the code for the app without restarting the app each time, download the driver app. Here's an example session using a different app:

Some reference documentation on how to create your own apps.

If the app being modified by the driver lives in a .love file, your changes will go into the save directory. If it lives in a directory (like this repo), your changes will go straight into the same directory.

Keyboard shortcuts

• ctrl + arrow keys to move around
• ctrl+= to zoom in, ctrl+- to zoom out, ctrl+0 to reset zoom

Exclusively tested so far with a US keyboard layout. If you use a different layout, please let me know if things worked, or if you found anything amiss: http://akkartik.name/contact

Known issues

• No support yet for Unicode graphemes spanning multiple codepoints.

• No support yet for right-to-left languages.

• No scrollbars yet. That stuff is hard.

Mirrors and Forks

This repo is a fork of lines.love, an editor for plain text where you can also seamlessly insert line drawings. Its immediate upstream is a simple Lua-based markup language. Updates to it can be downloaded from:

• https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/mastodon-unfurl.love
• https://tildegit.org/akkartik/mastodon-unfurl.love
• https://git.merveilles.town/akkartik/mastodon-unfurl.love
• https://nest.pijul.com/akkartik/mastodon-unfurl.love (using the Pijul version control system)

Further forks are encouraged. If you show me your fork, I'll link to it here.

Feedback

Most appreciated. Messages, PRs, patches, forks, it's all good.