All right, timed out. Got the Lua client mostly written, but it's still buggy:
https://github.com/hishamhm/lua-mastodon

Rewrote the code from Python to Lua in 3 hours (a good deal of it searching for libraries) and another hour trying to figure out this bug with no success yet: https://github.com/hishamhm/lua-mastodon/issues/1

So close!