I follow a lot of people on Mastodon and I see lots of toots fly by. Every now and then I want to find one I have seen at some point, but that is currently hard to do.

This sounds like a problem more people might have yes? Yep, and to fix that Jan Lehnardt built Searchtodon.

But there was a strong backlash. It might have been bad timing, as it was around the time of one of the mass migrations from twitter to the fediverse and people felt their old ways of doing things were threatened. Whatever the reason, the backlash was so strong that Jan decided to shut it down.

You can read the full story here searchtodon.social and be sure to read the retrospective as well.

So I can’t use Searchtodon, instead I decided to see if the LLMs could vibe code a small iOS app to do it. And yes, they can. I call it Epsilon III. I will present it in another post briefly.

But before that I want to discuss how Epsilon III differs from Searchtodon.

The biggest difference is that it’s all local. Your timeline stays on your device, which allows it to be searched only by you, and instantly.

The second difference is that the app does not show the full toot (unless it’s really really short), it requires you to open the toot in your favourite Mastodon client or browser.

That means if the user has deleted it, you won’t be able to see anything more than part of it. The reasoning is because mastodon does not federate deletions, the app cannot know if a toot has been deleted. And we cannot try fetching all of them each time. So instead we just show enough so the user can know it’s the right toot, but to see the full text they must go to the original instance to fetch it.

These two things provide what I believe is a good compromise, allowing people to find toots from their timeline later, and going some way to protecting the privacy of the people whose toots are archived.