Mastodon Redirector

One thing that’s a bit of a hassle with Mastodon is that you can’t immediately follow people on other instances: you have to copy the username and search for it on the instance that hosts your account. Same story with favoriting and boosting their posts, when viewed on their instance’s URL.

To make this easier, this extension exists.

Demo

mastodon-redirector-0.4.0-demo.mp4

This demo shows Chrome with the extension running. My Mastodon host is front-end.social. After configuring the extension, I can quickly jump from other Mastodon instances to my own instance where I can follow/favorite/boost.

Installation

Quick Links

Use one of the buttons below to be taken to the extension stores

Chromium-based browsers

This applies to browsers that are based on Chromium. This includes Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, …

The easiest way is to install it from the Chrome Web Store

Alternatively you can clone this repository and load the extension unpacked. Before you can do this, you will need to build the project though.

Don’t forget to configure the extension.

Firefox

You can install the extension from the Firefox Add-Ons Website. Because this extension uses Manifest v3, support is limited to Firefox 109 and up.

To run the extension in older versions of Firefox:

• Go to about:config and set extensions.manifestV3.enabled to true
• Hit the “download file” link on the Add-Ons listing, upon which Firefox will prompt you to install it

Don’t forget to configure the extension.

Other Browsers

If you can’t or won’t run the extension, you can use the bookmarklets which also do the job.

Configuration

• Chrome:
  • Right click the extension icon and choose “Options”
  • Enter the details and hit “Save Settings”
• Firefox:
  • Right click the extension icon and choose “Manage Extension”
  • Click the three dot menu next to the extension name and click “preferences”
  • Enter the details and hit “Save Settings”

TIP: To get easy access, pin the extension icon

Usage

When viewing a Mastodon page on a different instance than yours, hit the extension icon to get redirected to the profile/post on your instance. You can also use the Alt+Shift+M / Option+Shift+M shortcut to invoke the redirect.

Furthermore, this extension modifies the modals Mastodon shows on other instances. When wanting to follow/favorite/boost, a button with a direct link to your Mastodon instance will be injected into the markup.

Development

Building

Due to minor differences in support for extensions that use Manifest v3 in Chromium and Firefox, the code of this repository cannot directly be loaded. The code needs to be built.

make build-all

The built, yet still unpacked, extensions can be found in ./build/firefox and ./build/chromium.

Building depends on jq which you must install first.

While actively developing, make use of the watch task. It will auto-rebuild whenever you save something in src/.

make watch

Loading

For Chromium based browsers, load the extension unpacked from the ./build/chromium folder. Alternatively you can use the run-chrome Make script:

make run-chrome

For Firefox, you’ll need web-ext to load the extension during development. A web-ext-config.js is included in the repository, so you can easily run web-ext run. Alternatively you can use the run-firefox Make script:

make run-firefox

Support and bugs

This project is offered as is. However, I am open to receiving bug reports and accepting PRs to improve this extension.

License

This project is released under the MIT public license. See the enclosed LICENSE for details.

Acknowledgements

Icon by Flatart