Building a Mastodon Client in to my Cyberpunk SSH App

Let me quickly get you up to speed: I wanted to build a website for my hacker projects, but instead of a website I ended up building an SSH app (because I’m weird). Basically, instead of visiting it in your web browser you have to open your terminal, run an SSH command, and then you use text commands to play with the application, read about my projects, etc.

Actually, there is a website, but it just plays a video demo and gives you a button to click if you want to check it out: hydrox.fun

Where does Mastodon fit in? Well, embedded in this application is a very simple and specific Mastodon client.

I thought it would be cool if users of the app could send me a message somehow and I thought it would be really cool if I could reply and they could see it in the app. Basically, this would give people a pseudo-anonymous way for them to message “Hydrox” through the app in a fun “80s Hacker Movie” kinda style.

Here’s a demo:

So how does this work? It’s all via the Mastodon API, which is very simple and great for project like this (or a Shortcut to easily post on Mac, iOS, or iPadOS).

The SSH app is written in go, and heavily uses the wonderful Charm libraries for the animation, graphics, and the SSH wrapper. I’m also using the Mastodon library, go-mastodon.

This was a fun silly project, but I wanted to quickly demo it here as the promise of Mastodon, and open social platforms in general, is really exciting. There’s a lot of things we can do with this now that there is something approaching critical mass!

If you want to talk about the app, you can use the app (!!) at ssh://hydrox.fun:1337…or you just hit me up on Mastodon directly. Either way is fine, but one isn’t as cool an hackery as the other.