About Splinter
Splinter is a tool for Mastodon threads. Splinter turns long articles into Mastodon threads and posts them for you automatically.
How Does Splinter Work?
Splinter tries to divide your text into posts by following a simple principle:
- Don't break words or paragraphs in the middle.
The only exceptions are if:
- the paragraph is too long (can't fit within one post),
- it's too short (we don't want super short posts), or
- you wrote one super long word that can't fit in a post (cheers for you!)
Manual Post Breaks
Splinter includes a Magic Word for forcing a post break. If you add a line with exactly five equal signs like this:
=====Splinter will break the thread at that point and start a new post.
Post Visibility
Post visibility determines who can see each post and where it appears.
In addition to Mastodon's regular visibility options (Public, Unlisted, Followers-only, and Direct), Splinter adds a special option: Thread.
Thread visibility means the first post is public, but the rest are unlisted. This prevents long threads from clogging people’s timelines. It's the default in Splinter.
Support in Other Fediverse Software
Does Splinter work with other Fediverse platforms compatible with Mastodon, like Sharkey, Misskey, Firefish, or others? Hopefully—but I haven't tested it myself. If you try it out, let me know! I’ll add a note here if it works.
Missing Features
Here are some features I'd like to add to Splinter in the future. See the Contribution section if you'd like to help!
- Reply to an existing post,
- Support for custom emojis,
- RTL language support (Arabic, Hebrew, etc.)
Privacy
Splinter minimizes the amount of data stored to the bare minimum. We only save what's necessary for the app to function properly.
- Once a client is authenticated with Mastodon, the server stores an authentication token.
- The client stores a cookie used for identification with the server.
Other than that, no data is saved. Drafts of posts are stored locally on the client. No post data is stored on the server after posting.
Contribution
Splinter’s source code is published at Codeberg.
Contributions are very welcome, but please coordinate with me (via email or Mastodon) before starting work. Otherwise, I can't promise your changes will be included.
License
Splinter's source code is released under the GPL license.
About Me
Hi there! I'm Neiman (nickname, not a real name!). I got a degree in math, but I've mostly worked on p2p and applied cryptography for the past 9 years.
My dream is to create a democratic web, but in the meantime I build fun tools and write articles on digital identity, digital democracy, and cryptography. Check out my website for more!
If you have feedback or suggestions, feel free to reach out via email, Mastodon, or check out my blog for more thoughts and updates.