An open source, decentralized version of Twitter, Mastodon has been in development since 2016. With Elon Musk's erratic decisions since purchasing Twitter in late 2022, many users predicting Twitter's doom have been searching desperately for alternatives. The result has been a new surge in interest in Mastodon – even if many newcomers remain puzzled by its open source organization. The interest is so great that Mastodon's founder Eugen Rochko reports that he has received offers of "hundreds of thousands of dollars" from five investors – offers he refused so as not to endanger Mastodon's nonprofit status [1]. As I write, the exodus from Twitter appears to have slowed, but along with the renewed interest in Mastodon has come a renewed interest among Linux users in toot [2], an open source command-line client for Mastodon.

Toot takes its name from Mastodon's equivalent of Twitter's tweets, the microblog messages posted by users. Officially, the term is obsolete, with Mastodon's latest release replacing toot with a simple Publish button [3], but the term remains widely used. Toot compares favorably with Twitter clients for Linux such as Twidge, Oyster, and Rainbow Stream, many of which are not up-to-date, and have an alarming tendency to come and go without warning. By contrast, although current users must still use the web interface to create a Mastodon account for everyday use, toot is a complete replacement for the web version of Mastodon (Figure 1), providing functionality that is both thoroughly documented and up-to-date with Mastodon through a series of commands and options that keeps users' hands firmly on the keyboard.

Figure 1: The Mastodon web application.

Getting Started

You will find toot in the package repositories of many distributions and you can also install toot using Homebrew, although some sources are more current than others. However you choose to install, to use toot, you must create an account in a Mastodon instance from a web browser before logging in with the command toot login_cli (Figure 2). Upon launching, toot creates a configuration file in your home directory at .config/toot/config.json. You must then specify a Mastodon instance to log in to – but note that its name must be entered in lowercase characters with periods rather than spaces between the words, regardless of how the instance name is presented in the web interface. After toot locates the instance, enter your email and password to log in. For later access, toot stores your email and a temporary access token in the configuration file so that your password is never stored unencrypted. Once you are connected to an instance, you can enter user whoami to display user details and toot whois to display account details. To switch accounts, use toot activate. To see a list of active accounts, enter toot auth.

Figure 2: Logging in to toot.

Posting Toots

You can post a toot in several ways. The simplest (as shown in Figure 3) is:

toot post 'MESSAGE'

Figure 3: One of several ways to post a toot.

Alternatively, you can compose a toot in a text editor of your choice (Figure 4) – Vim in this example – with the following command:

toot post --editor vim

Figure 4: You can compose a toot in the text editor of your choice.

Save and exit the toot as you normally would in the editor, and the toot is also posted. If you prefer to always use a text editor, define your preferred editor as an environmental variable (for instance, export EDITOR=vim), and then you can simply use the following command:

toot post --editor

With all these variations of the command, you can add up to four attachments. For the first attachment, use the option

-media path/to/image1.png --description "TEXT" \

and then change the image number for the subsequent attachments. If necessary, you can flag attachments with:

--media nsfw.png --sensitive

Once a toot is posted, you can see any replies using toot notifications.

Viewing the Timeline

When viewing toots in your timeline, the basic command toot timeline displays the most recent toot. It then gives you the option of either displaying the last dozen toots or else exiting the client altogether. You can also use the options listed in Table 1 to modify which toots are displayed.

At the bottom of each toot, you will find its ID and whether it has been reblogged. You can pin one of your own toots to the top of your timeline with toot pin ID or delete it with toot delete ID (Figure 5).

Figure 5: The toot timeline.

You can locate other people on Mastodon with

toot search "NAME"

or by their Mastodon instance address with

toot search NAME@INSTANCE

With an instance address, you can also use the self-explanatory commands follow, mute, block, or unfollow. To like a toot, used the command

toot favourite ID

(note the UK English spelling). To reblog toot use toot reblog ID.

Should you decide to undo any of these actions, you can run the same commands prefaced by un. For example, if you decide on second thought not to favor a toot, use the command:

toot unfavourite ID

The rest you can probably figure out for yourself. If necessary, though, for detailed summaries, run

toot COMMAND --help

You can perform all these basic functions from the command line or start the curses user interface with toot tui (Figure 6). The curses interface is navigated by the keyboard commands shown in Table 2.

Figure 6: Toot includes an alternative curses-based interface for working with the timeline.