Mastodon website bookmarklets

"Bookmarklets", are links on your bookmarks toolbar, that let you perform an action on the current page. This page has two bookmarklets to make it easier to use Mastodon in a web browser.

Toggle CWs

CW👁️ is a bookmarklet to show/hide all "Content Warning" (CW) content. To install, drag the link to your bookmarks toolbar (toggle with Ctrl-Shift-B).

You can use Mastodon's existing 👁️ icon to show/hide CWs in threads. This bookmarklet works everywhere.

Instance changer

[Last updated 2022-12-15 to fix an XSS issue.]

Using Mastodon in a web browser you can follow a user on another instance, or reply to their posts, but only from your instance's website. However, you might want to see some pages on their original instance so that you see everything correctly. This form creates a bookmarklet to quickly toggle between instance websites.

This page is easier to use if you turn on Javascript. But if you don't want to, drag the following link to your bookmark bar (Ctrl-Shift-B) and then edit myInstance, myInstanceURL, and ver3 in its code by hand: mstdn🔁

Warnings:

  1. I don't do any tracking, notifications, or automatic updates. The downside is you have to do updates by hand. There was a XSS issue in versions before 2022-12-15, and I had no way to tell you. Fortunately it wasn't likely anyone could exploit it in practice, but still concerning.
  2. If your instance upgrades its Mastodon software, the bookmarklet is likely to break. If I've fixed the issue, you'd have to come back here and recreate the bookmarklet. But I might not be able to fix the issue, and/or find the time to do so.
  3. If the bookmarklet fails to redicrect, copy the location bar of the page you want into the search box of the instance you use. Hopefully this bookmarklet reduces the number of times you need to do that.
  4. Using dedicated Mastodon apps is slicker than using a web browser. It's also possible you can find a browser extension with a better experience. However, you must really trust the author of a browser extension to keep it secure from attacks on everything your browser knows and can do (e.g., banking and email).

This page was produced by Iain Murray (2022). You can follow me on Mastodon. The tool is provided as-is, in the hope it's useful, but comes with no guarantees or responsibility for problems. Feel free to tell me about any issues, but please understand that I might not have time to fix them.