shareon.js.org now has a Share to Mastodon button

I was looking for the right way to make a "Share This"-style button for my tiny games site Smolpxl, and I found shareon which worked exactly the way I wanted (load the JavaScript and call a function to display the buttons, with no privacy concerns), and looked really nice.

The only thing that was missing was a Mastodon button.

"Share to Mastodon" is more complicated than something like Share to Twitter, because Mastodon is not one web site, but lots of web sites that all talk to each other.

So, after someone clicks "Share to Mastodon", you need to ask them which web site (or Mastodon instance) they meant.

I started out by hacking a Mastodon button in after the shareon ones, and prompting the user for their instance. This was a little unfriendly, but it worked:

But luckily I didn't stick with that. Because I think shareon is awesome, and because I want more people to use Mastodon, I decided to try adding a Mastodon button to shareon. I wrote the code to work similarly to my original hack, and submitted a Pull Request.

I am really glad I did that, because what followed was a really positive Free and Open Source Software mini-interaction. Nick Karamov responded with lots of improvements and bug fixes to my original change, and as we discussed the problem more, I expressed the desire for a proper page to choose Mastodon instance, that would be more friendly than a simple prompt. I also said that it would be difficult.

In retrospect, maybe suggesting it would be difficult was a clever trick, because the next thing I knew, Nick had implemented just such a page: toot.karamoff.dev!

Because toot.karamoff.dev now existed, the "Share to Mastodon" button became much simpler: we can send our post information to toot.karamoff.dev, and it asks which Mastodon instance you want to use, and passes it on the correct place.

So my new Pull Request was much simpler than the original, and with a few more improvements suggested by Nick, it's merged and I have a usable Share to Mastodon button without hacking it in.

The cake has a little more icing too, because I was also able to improve toot.karamoff.dev by adding code that downloads the up-to-date list of Mastodon instances from joinmastodon.org and provides them as suggestions, which can be really helpful if you can't remember the exact name of your instance. Again, Nick's suggestions on my Pull Request were incredibly helpful and made the code way better than what I originally wrote. Now it works really smoothly:

In a small way, this was a fantastic example of how effective and fun working on Free and Open Source Software can be.