Micro app 10: MastoThreads
For years, I have been posting long-running threads on social media for the movies that I watch each year. I start a thread on January 1st with my first movie, and I keep it going through the end of the year. The process for this is pretty manual. After I've written the review and created the image that I want, I have to open my Mastodon app, go to my profile, scroll backwards in time until I get to the last post in the thread, and then reply to that post. This usually isn't too bad, but if there's ever a gap where I don't watch a movie for a couple weeks or if I was particularly active on social media, it can get pretty time-consuming and tedious to find that last post.
The concept of this micro app is pretty simple. Basically, I authenticate with my Mastodon account and I give it a URL for the most recent post in a thread, and then I can easily add on to that thread when I open the app.
When I tap the new post button, I am presented with a very simple text area and media attachment UI which submits the post as a reply to the most recent in the thread. That makes the new post the latest in the thread, and the next post will reply to that. Because it was trivial to implement, I also added a history so I can scroll the list to see my recent posts in the thread as well.
I don't know if I'll end up using it, but I did create a UI that allows you to swipe left and right between your active threads. So if I wanted to have one thread for movies and one for games or anything else I wanted to do, I could have multiple threads going at once.
I also allow for renaming threads and updating the "anchor post" if things ever get out of sync.
Meanwhile, the settings page is extremely minimal. All I do is enter my instance URL and create an access token that I paste in here (no fancy OAuth). It's just for me, so this works fine.
Total development time to get here: about 45 minutes.
Public release when?
I don't currently have any plans to release this publicly, but let me know if you're interested. I wasn't going to make Yearly Run Goals public either, but I was overwhelmed with people requesting that app, so it made me dedicate some time to it (and it's been more successful than I ever expected, as well!).
