Tyler HillsmanJan 25, 2023
I’m in the middle of building something that is just silly enough to be interesting and just useful enough to be releasable.
Show threadTyler HillsmanJan 25, 2023

Ok, so.

Tweets look really good when you send them in Messages on iOS/macOS. Mastodon posts… don’t. So I built a little tool that makes them much nicer to look at:

https://mstdn.link

Add ?to={any Mastodon post URL} to the end of that domain and when you send it to a friend, you get the nice looking preview. Of course the page makes it easy to paste a URL in. And there’s a Shortcut to make it even easier on iOS or macOS.

mstdn.link - Share Mastodon posts better

Show threadPhilip Mallegol-HansenJan 25, 2023
@thillsman That’s cool! It would be even cooler to open a PR against the Mastodon project adding appropriate link previews so it just works out of the box.
Show threadTyler Hillsman
@philip I thought about that too. The trick is that Messages is looking explicitly for a Twitter URL in a meta tag, so this fakes it. I doubt Mastodon proper would want to do that.
Jan 25, 2023 at 10:27pmIvory for iOS
Show threadPhilip Mallegol-HansenJan 25, 2023

@thillsman I haven’t looked closely enough to say with any authority: iMessage renders various previews for other sites. Are they all faking being Twitter?

If yes, it’s a stupid hack, but one that seems worthwhile following. If no, however other sites render previews, should be doable for Mastodon as well?

Show threadNamanJan 26, 2023
@philip @thillsman For most websites iMessage will show open graph images. So if mastodon can render to an SVG image that *should* work.
Show threadJens AytonJan 26, 2023
@philip @thillsman I believe iMessage puts Twitter and Facebook boy scraper names in its user-agent, and some sites use this to render pages that iMessage will turn into better previews