I'm a big fan of Mastodon and I plan to cover PyCon US 2025 on Mastodon almost exclusively (and it sounds like I'm not alone).
This was the plan last year, too, but I found typing out all the hashtags every time definitely discouraged me from posting about "in-the-moment" stuff.
The goal is to quickly capture a thought, interaction, or image, share to Mastodon, and then get back to enjoying the conference.
Pre-populated event hashtags!
So I went looking for a solution and found that Mastodon supports share URLs with pre-filled content, like hashtags. What I wanted to do was add a URL to my phone home screen:
https://<instance domain name>/share?text=%0A%0A%23PyCon%20%23PyConUS%20%23PyConUS2025
The above percent-encoded text parameter is:
\n\n#PyCon #PyConUS #PyConUS2025
If we could save this URL direct to the home screen that would be
the end of the story. Unfortunately, at least for iOS you can't save a web page that
has a query parameter in the URL (like ?text=...), so the
solution needs to be slightly more complicated.
What I ended up doing is adding this URL to a GitHub Gist and then saving the Gist webpage to my home screen. On iOS the process is:
- Navigate to the Gist in your mobile browser
- Use the "share" button within the browser
- Select "Add to Home Screen" in the share screen
- Give the page a name (I went with "#PyConUS2025").
- :tada:
Now I'm only ever two clicks away from a ready-to-use toot
template for PyCon US.
This technique is remixable for any hashtags or other
text you're tooting often. Use urllib.parse.quote() in Python to create percent-encoded text.
