Guidelines

Login

The user must be able to login to any Mastodon server from the app. This means you must ask for either the full handle, or server domain, and use the app registrations API to dynamically obtain OAuth2 credentials.

Usernames

Decentralization must be transparent to the user. It should be possible to see that a given user is from another server, by e.g. displaying their acct (username and domain) somewhere.

Formatting

Plain text is not available for content from remote servers, and plain text syntax rules may vary wildly between Mastodon and other fediverse applications. For certain attributes, such as the content of statuses, Mastodon provides sanitized HTML.

HTML tags

You may expect these tags to appear in the content: <p>, <br>, <span>, <a>

Mentions and hashtags

Mentions and hashtags are <a> tags. To give those links their semantic meaning and add special handling, such as opening a mentioned profile within your app instead of as a web page, metadata is included with the status, which can be matched to a particular tag.

Custom emoji

Custom emoji remain in their plain text shortcode form. Metadata about the determined custom emoji is included with the status, and the shortcodes must be matched against the text to display the images.

Other links

Links in Mastodon are not shortened using URL shorteners. However, URLs in text always count for 23 characters, and are intended to be shortened visually. For that purpose, a link is marked up like this:

<a href="https://example.com/page/that/is/very/long">
  <span class="invisible">https://</span>
  <span class="ellipsis">example.com/page</span>
  <span class="invisible">/that/is/very/long</span>
</a>

The spans with the invisible class can be hidden. The middle span is intended to remain visible. It may have no class if the URL is not very long, otherwise it will have an ellipsis class. No ellipsis (…) character is inserted in the markup, instead, you are expected to insert it yourself if you need it in your app.

Filters

Clients must do their own text filtering based on filters returned from the API. The server will apply irreversible filters for home and notifications context, but anything else is still up to the client to filter!

Expired filters are not deleted by the server. They should no longer be applied but they are still stored by the server. It is up to clients to delete those filters eventually.

Last updated September 17, 2019 · Improve this page