Best-o-Masto comes to the web

I love Best-o-Masto, my iPhone app for browsing the most popular posts in your feed, but I'm not always on my phone. That's why today I'm happy to announce Best-o-Masto is available on the web and you can use it from any device. This also makes it available to Android users, which the iOS app obviously wasn't.

For those who don't know, the concept of Best-o-Masto is that Mastodon does not have any algorithmic feeds to surface the most notable posts in your timeline. That's fine and is likely one of the sources of the more calm vibe on the platform, but it also does mean that if you want to find all the notable posts when you sign on once or twice a day, you have potentially hundreds of posts to sift through and if you don't, you're liable to miss notable things that you would have wanted to see.

Best-o-Masto is not an algorithm for your Mastodon feed, but it does do a very simple query of the last few hundred posts in your feed, source them by engagement, and just list them from 1 to 30. You can like and boost posts directly from the interface, but I have not implemented any posting functionality. So if you want to reply, you can click the reply button to open the post in your instance in a new tab.

Another thing of note is just like the mobile app, the service will only update once every hour. This is not meant to be a place where you watch new posts coming in or that you can obsessively refresh to see new stuff. It actively does not want you to spend all day on it; the whole point is to get you in and out quickly.

Best-o-Masto is 100% free, both in terms of ads and cost. I hope you enjoy it.