Posting to Mastodon via Shortcuts

The best thing to come out of Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase (and then backing out of the purchase, and then purchase, and then massive layoffs, and allowing crazies back on Twitter, and whatever happened today) is that Mastodon has been so much fun!

One extremely minor annoyance has been the lack of good Mastodon clients, and while TapBots is hard at work on that right now, it makes posting on Mastodon a little bit harder than it was on Twitter. Besides a nice native app, I really liked being able to fire off a short thought or joke from Alfred or the Spotlight search directly to Twitter and I miss that in my new Mastodon reality.

The solution? A quick Shortcut named “Post to Mastodon”

UPDATE 2: v2.2 is out. It can be downloaded here, and read about here.

UPDATE: There is now a v2 version of the this Shortcut that supports image uploads as well. I will leave the v1 links in place on this post, but you can check out the post for v2 or download v2 directly.

Clicking the above link (or the full screenshot below) will allow you install the shortcut on your Mac, iPad, or iPhone. It’s very simple, but it does the trick!

Once you install the Shortcut you will need to edit it to add two things:

1. The domain of your Mastodon server.
2. The access token for the app you will need to setup in your Mastodon preferences

Here’s how to set that up:

Go your Mastodon site in your browser. Click on Preferences > Development > New Application. Give you application a name like “Apple Posting Shortcut” and check “write:statuses” so that your key can create a post and nothing else. Click Submit Copy the “Your access token” text.

Once you save the shortcut with your domain and access token, you’re all set. You can then trigger it directly, or from Spotlight, etc. If you pass the shortcut text it will immediately post it to Mastodon and if you don’t pass it text, it will prompt you to enter message and push a notification that tells you if it worked or failed.

Here’s a full screenshot of the logic:

If you add something to it, find a bug, or just want to chat, I’d love to hear your thoughts: @[email protected]