mastodon-is-my-blog 0.4.1

A personal Mastodon reader and blog management tool

🐘 Mastodon is My Blog

My attempt to create an alternative Mastodon client based on a blogging interface instead of the infinite feed.

• Transform your tweet storms into a static eleventy blog.
• View your friends content in person centric way
• View your special interests in a focused way
• Write, edit, and manage your Mastodon posts in a clean, blog-style interface. (Kind of still in progress)

Installation

pipx install mastodon-is-my-blog
# initialize your accounts and API keys
mimb init
# launch webserver and website
mimb start

Documentation found here

Why?

Because I want to re-orient my mastodon usage from low value infinite doom-scrolling to high value finite activities.

I want the UI to be human centric and encourage seeing people first.

I want the UI to encourage medium length writing as much as reading, including thought out drafts, as well as short content and replies.

Implemented Features

• Eleventy blog, published via GH Actions
• Local Client, which is a Python FastAPI+Sqlite data source and an Angular Website.
  • Downloads all my data to sqlite, used by blog engine
  • Downloads data of people I follow, hashtags I follow
    • Blog-reader like interface for people
    • Content hub for special interests (pictures, videos, software links, etc)
    • Discussion page (primitive, not done, shows threads my friends participated in)
    • Writing Page (primitive, not done)
    • Admin Page

Some design decisions

• Refresh is done by clicking a button. Content doesn't arrive in a stream.
• Doesn't feel like a mixed feed. All feeds are filtered, either by person or topic.
• The reader doesn't have any actions. Actions are done via link back to home instance.
• Client side hashtag bundles because viewing a hashtag on Mastodon is broken.
  • Why? Because #python and #python314 and so on really should show in the same feed. This can only be achieved on vanilla Mastodon via the main feed, which is mixed with 99% unrelated content. Also, most hashtags have not much going on.
• I call the friends a blogroll and group them by
  • Top Friends (people who are mutuals and have ever commented on my content)
  • Mutuals (they at least read my content)
  • Bots (No one is there, this is just content)
  • Broadcasters (Like bots, they write but never interact, at least not with me)
• Retweets are suppressed everywhere. But not quote tweets.

Roadmap

• Analytics page - show performance in one place, not on every post

Other good features

• Treat Mastodon as your personal blog engine. Done! Finally.
• Keep full control with local hosting. This would be ruinously expensive for me to host this for others.
• Beautiful, distraction-free writing interface. Partial!
• Engage with comments/replies easily. Not really!
• Your data stays on your Mastodon instance. Sort of! If you use Github pages, you got a copy of your posts in two places now. The rest of your data is local to your machine.

Local Development

See SETUP.md for detailed setup instructions.

git clone https://github.com/matthewdeanmartin/mastodon_is_my_blog.git

# 1. Install the package
uv sync

# Optional: install Datasette helpers too
uv sync --extra datasette

# 2. Run interactive account setup
uv run mastodon_is_my_blog init

# 3. Start the backend
uv run mastodon_is_my_blog start --reload

# 4. Start the frontend (in another terminal)
cd web && ng serve

Open http://localhost:4200. If you skipped the access token during init, use the "Connect Account" button in the top bar (or the Admin page) to finish connecting that account — or add more accounts at any time, via OAuth or pasted API keys.

Static Storm Export

Build the Eleventy blog export for your own long posts and self-reply threads into docs\:

npm --prefix docs-src install
npm --prefix docs-src run build

Architecture

• Backend: FastAPI + mastodon.py + SQLAlchemy
• Frontend: Angular (standalone components)
• Storage: SQLite for tokens and caching, Mastodon for content

More Roadmap

• Draft saving
• Analytics dashboard
• RSS feed links. Maybe already done? Check eleventy.

Why not a single user instance?

First off, that is really a different concept. A single user instance without massive customization is still going to be same experience as mastodon.social, both for people reading your content and for you reading other people's content.

It costs a minimum of $10 a month and requires a server to be running all the time. Administering a server is a burden.

I want this to be as burdensome as using a mastodon client and have a way to use it for free.

License

MIT

Project Links

• GitHub
• PyPI
• Documentation
• Bug Tracker
• Change Log