MastoGizmos Gets An Overhaul

I had a very productive Labor Day weekend. I finally got WikiTwister figured out, and last night I finished upgrading MastoGizmos ( https://mastogizmos.com/ )!

MastoGizmos is a collection of 11 search tools to explore Mastodon. (You do not have to have a Mastodon account to use any of these tools.) There are tools for hashtag searching, discovering users, and even finding trending news and gift articles! I spent some time tightening up the code and making the tools easier to use as well as polishing up a simple design. (I have limited design skills so I try to keep things simple!) Let me give a tour of the tools.

MastoTrends — https://mastogizmos.com/mt.html

A screenshot of MastoTrends. It's showing three articles from various randomly-selected instances around Mastodon.

MastoTrends grabs ten random instances from Instances.Social and fetches their trending link lists. I just made this for a quick look at what’s hot around Mastodon. For a more in-depth look (with an RSS feed!) try FediTrends.

Gift Article Gazette — https://mastogizmos.com/gag.html

A screenshot of Gift Article Gazette showing the Washington Post article "Abandoned walrus calf is 'ginormous puppy,' getting 24/7 care in Alaska." Beneath that is information about the gift article and original URL, a brief description of the article, and a picture of the cutest walrus calf you ever saw.

Gift Article Gazette aggregates Mastodon posts hashtagged “GiftLink” or “GiftArticle.” Because gift links usually expire, links are filtered from the last two weeks’ worth of posts.

The Big Mastodon Hashtag Search — https://mastogizmos.com/bmhs.html

The interface for Big Mastodon Hashtag Search. The first part of the interface asks if you want to add additional instances to the default search. Beneath that, a number of checkboxes allow filtering of the returned results.

One of the complaints I hear about Mastodon is that search is pointless because you can only search one instance at a time. That’s silly. Mastodon has a wonderful API. If you search a bunch of popular instances using it, you can get a nice hashtag search together.

That’s what the Big Mastodon Hashtag Search does — it searches 14 popular Mastodon instances with the option for you to add your own. The search results offer a number of filters. There’s a slider where you can filter by social score (calculated based on the number of replies/reposts/favorites) and a number of filtering checkboxes for recency, content marked sensitive, bots, verified accounts, etc. You can also do a full-text search of returned results if you’re looking for something really specific.

Mastodon Custom Verified User Search — https://mastogizmos.com/mcvus.html

A screenshot of the Mastodon Custom Verified User Search in action. The search term was "rss" and the verification string was "github." There are 40 results listed, starting with Scott Ellis in a post from August 31.

Mastodon lets users self-verify links in their bio, which I find pretty terrific. Twitter irritated me a lot when it would verify marketing personas like Mr. Peanut while ignoring the verification requests of real actual people. But with Mastodon allowing self-verification anybody can have verified links.

MCVUS lets you search Mastodon by hashtag and find posts from users with specific strings in their verified links. In the example above, I have done a search for the hashtag #RSS and searched for the string github in the verified bio links. I made this hoping/anticipating more government and institutional instances; it would be great to do a hashtag search and find people who work in specific locations or at specific agencies.

David’s ‘Dex — https://mastogizmos.com/dex.html

A screenshot of David's Dex in action. It is looking at Journa.host, filtering users by follower count and recent activity. In the detail page more information is shown about journalist and academic Dan Kennedy.

David’s Dex is named after David August, who gave me the idea. David’s Dex loads the first 25,000 users of a specified instance and lets you browse/search them. You can filter by a number of factors, including follower count and how recently they have posted. You can also browse by bio links, verified or not.

Hashtag Harvest — https://mastogizmos.com/hh.html

A screenshot of Hashtag Harvest in action. A search has been done for #mastodon .Beneath that a number of related hashtags are listed, including #news, #press, and #Ukraine.

Are your hashtag searches coming up short on your instance? Hashtag Harvest searches hashtags across four large instances and generates a list of related hashtags based on their frequency in the search results. Additionally, Hashtag Harvest lists Mastodon users who are associated with your searched hashtag, if you’re looking for people to follow.

Wikipedia-Mastodon Thing — https://mastogizmos.com/wmt.html

A screenshot of Wikipedia-Mastodon thing in action. Sweden has been searched for,. Beneath that are six Wikipedia articles which have Mastodon addresses associated with them, including Markus Perrson, Pirate Party, and Greta Thunberg.

Occasionally my ability to name my tools fails, lol. Anyway, Wikipedia-Mastodon Thing lets you keyword search Wikipedia for articles with associated Mastodon addresses.

Mastodon Web Search — https://mastogizmos.com/mws.html

Mastodon Web Search in action. This part shows a bunch of checkboxes with Mastodon instance information with them. Pick ten of them and they'll be bundled into a Google search (using the site: syntax) along with your original query.

Mastodon is a social network but it’s ALSO a set of Web sites. And Web sites can be searched. Mastodon Web Search gives you two different ways to find Mastodon instances via Instances.Social and lets you bundle those instances into a Google search with the help of site: syntax.

RSStodon — https://mastogizmos.com/rss.html

RSStodon. There's a form for language code, and another for hashtag. This one mostly generates an external text file so the screenshots aren't very exciting.

I am RSS for life and I’m not apologizing for it. RSStodon takes a language and a keyword and generates an OPML file of keyword-based feeds for the largest ten instances in that language.

Mastodon Username Helper — https://mastogizmos.com/muh.html

A screenshot of Mastodon Username Helper in action. It's showing a variety of information for the username researchbuzz@researchbuzz.masto.host, including user page URL, RSS feed for user, and RSS feed for instance hashtags and user hashtags.

Mastodon usernames can be a little difficult to understand for a new user. The Mastodon Username Helper explains the username and provides some additional links, like to user RSS feeds and feeds for user-posted hashtags.

Local vs Fedi — https://mastogizmos.com/lvf.html

A screenshot of Local vs Fedi in action. The instance searched is mastodon.social and the hashtag searched is RSS. Beneath that two columns show local posts versus federated posts.

Mastodon instances have local posts (posts which were made by users registered on that instance) and posts made from outside the instance. Local vs Fedi lets you enter an instance and hashtag and see what local results look like compared to posts from outside the instance.