Tootpick is a privacy-preserving tooter.

Its purpose is providing an easy link target for a "Mastodon share button", similar to other social media share buttons.

Share on Mastodon ← demo!

To allow visitors to share a message via Mastodon, provide a link to

https://tootpick.org/#text=Everyone%20should%20visit%20https://example.org/

This will let the visitor pick their Mastodon server and post the message "Everyone should visit https://example.org/". When sharing an article or web page, don't forget to include the URL as part of the text. The text must be "URI encoded", i.e. spaces must be replaced by %20, ampersands by %26, etcetera, just like is common for URLs. It is customary to include several relevant hashtags; use %23 for the # sign. For details, see "Fragment parameters" below.

Most Mastodon servers have a 500 character limit so it's wise to keep your message shorter than that. Tootpick does not check the length of the message.

The functionality is simple and does not requires bells and whistles. In true KISS spirit, Tootpick is a single static HTML page. It can be used through the hosted tootpick.org, or by self-hosting the single HTML file.

Tootpick uses the "hash" or "fragment" part of the URL, which is not sent to the HTTP server, for passing the message. Javascript is used to parse the URL and pass the data onto the chosen Mastodon instance. Only the instance server will actually receive the contents of the message to be posted.

Because Tootpick is a static page in between the article that has the "share" link and the mastodon instance, the original Referer URL won't make it to the instance, hiding any possibly sensitive tracking information from the instance admins. (It is not possible for Tootpick to prevent sending the Referer to the server that hosts Tootpick.)

Hi, it's me, the author of Tootpick. Because I'm not collecting any data from Tootpick users, I have no idea who uses it. If you're using Tootpick on your website, and want to let me know, please "star" the project on GitHub or send me a message on Mastodon (@[email protected]) - that way I know whether I should keep maintaining it. Thanks!

Most existing instance pickers will provide an option to remember the last used instance, but that's not sufficiently helpful for users who use multiple instances, which is not entirely uncommon. Tootpick remembers multiple recently used instances.

If the main feature works for 99% of all internet users, and 98% get the site with the intended aesthetics, that's good enough. Tootpick does not support ancient browsers like IE, and may look ugly and have degraded feature availability on old browsers. (The percentages are completely made up and just for illustrating the point.)

It should also be usable by people who use assistive technologies, but that comes for free by using normal HTML.

Real people make mistakes, and some common mistakes can be recognised and fixed by the script. A user may provide the wrong domain, a URL instead of the bare domain name, an account, or the account domain instead of the web domain, and Tootpick tries to recover from that and do the right thing.

// JavaScript example
document.location = 'https://tootpick.org/#text=' + encodeURIComponent(
  document.title + ' ' + document.URL
);