Mastodon Address Book.

Introduction.

Mastodon is a social network which has become popular in recent months. One of its attractions is that you can express yourself more fully, as some of the server providers allow you to send messages comprising thousands of characters. after all, if you have to condense a message into a small number of characters, this can lead to misunderstanding and frustration. But one problem can occur, and this relates to how to remember the different addresses of the people you would like to write to. Meet the Mastodon Address Book which can help.

How It Works.

If you want to mention someone on Mastodon, you use the at sign followed by the address. This is a little like an Email address in structure. So if you wanted to write to our company, you would type an at sign followed by hartgenconsult at tweesecake.social.

Now, that is a fairly simple address, but some of them can be far more complex than that. what you really want to do is to type a person's name, even in abbreviated form, so you can get on with writing the message.

This is what the mastodon address book allows you to do. You can use it in any text edit area, so in this context, that means a special client designed for the visually impaired to serve this purpose, a web site, etc.

To set up each entry, we need to get the address of the user on the clipboard. The procedure for how you do this will vary according to the environment in which you are working. For example, you might obtain it from the profile of the user. Certainly if you are using a Mastodon client such as Tweesecake or TWBlue, which are freely available, then it is easy enough to do. If you know the address already, you could type it out in a Notepad document.

When the address has been selected and copied to the Clipboard:

1. Press the Leasey Key then Control+K.
2. When prompted, type a name for the entry. The end result of this is that you are going to type this entry, so you want something which is quick and easy. The name is not going to be shared with anyone else. It is only important to you. So if you were typing to Laura Smith, you could type the abbreviation LS. Provided you know what those letters represent, that is acceptable. The word "Laura" could be used if you are sure you are only ever going to send a message to one person with that name.
3. Press Enter.

To reproduce an entry, within a Mastodon message composition field, type an At sign followed by the name you gave the Mastodon address in the previous steps, such as, @LS. Then, without typing a space, press the Leasey Key followed by the letter K. You will hear that the name has been inserted. If you then read the current line, you should hear the full address after the At sign.

There could be situations where you cannot remember the names or abbreviations you have stored. If that is so, press the Leasey Key followed by Control+Shift+K. A list of all your entries will appear.

From this point you have some choices:

1. You can examine the list with the Up or Down Arrow keys, just to remind yourself of those you have, and press Escape to close.
2. You can press Enter on one of these entries, and the full address is inserted into your current location.
3. You can focus on any entry and press the Leasey Key followed by Delete, so as to remove the entry.