statsbadge-mastodon

Your Mastodon timeline and account, for statsbadge.

The newest post in your feed, the newest mention, the newest notification of any kind and your last post, alongside your followers, following, posts and unread count. Add a Notifications page and put any mixture of them on it: the messages stack down the page and the counters go in a strip along the bottom.

Install

statsbadge ext add mastodon

Then, in the config UI under Extensions, set your instance and paste your access token.

The token

In Mastodon: Preferences → Development → New application. Give it a name, leave the scopes at read (that is all this asks for), and save. The application's page then shows Your access token.

Paste that and your instance's host - fosstodon.org, no https:// - into the settings. The token is stored in the host's config file in plain text. The config page keeps it masked behind Edit secrets.

Settings

Pictures

One picture per post, where the post has one: the first attachment, cropped to what is actually in it and drawn in the theme's palette.

small is 64x48 in four shades and adds about 950 bytes to a message; large is 128x96 in eight and adds about 4KB. Four subsequent posts with images might cause animation hiccups so choose carefully.

What it reports

Four of these are messages, and go on a Notifications page as a block of text with who it is from and how long ago:

The rest are numbers, and go anywhere a number goes:

Followers and following are kept hourly, so a graph of either shows a week rather than the last ninety seconds. Mastodon reports no history of its own, so that ring is built as the host runs: it is empty on a first launch and fills an hour at a time.

Notes

Four requests a refresh, against a limit of 300 in five minutes, so the default of two minutes is 1/40th of the API limit.

A boost includes no content of its own - the content is on the post inside it - so the original post is drawn with "boosted by" beside it.

Post bodies arrive as HTML. Tags go, entities are decoded, and paragraph and line breaks become spaces rather than being dropped. They are cut to 160 characters on the server, comfortably more than the two or three lines a page draws.

Mastodon "readings" change every couple of minutes and the badge polls every second, so they are declared slow: the host sends them when they change and the badge holds on to them.