Ariadne — share threads

Good writing happens on Mastodon in threads. Someone posts, replies to themselves, and keeps going until an essay exists — spread across a dozen posts, interleaved with other people's replies, and held together by a link that stops working the day the post is deleted.

Ariadne takes that thread out and gives you back the article it always was.

You share a Mastodon post from Safari or from your Mastodon client. Ariadne walks up to the first post of the author's thread, follows the chain of self-replies to the end, and hands you a clean document: the author's name and full @handle@instance, their words with the paragraphs they wrote, and their pictures where they put them. No avatars, no boost counts, no interface chrome.

From there it goes wherever you send it — Notes, Files, Obsidian, Messages, email, anywhere the share sheet reaches.

In a hurry? "PDF from Thread", "Markdown from Thread" and "HTML from Thread" sit in the share sheet's action list and export the whole thread in one tap. And when you only want the one post you shared, not the thread around it, Ariadne can give you just that.

THREE FORMATS

• PDF — sized to be read on a phone, split into pages or as one long scroll
• Markdown — with the images beside it as real files, and the full-size originals a tap away
• Web page — one self-contained HTML file, pictures and all

WHAT IT KEEPS

• Links stay links, and a link to another Mastodon post becomes a quotation of that post
• A link to any other site arrives with that site's own title, description and cover image
• Alt text can become a caption under each image, if you want it
• Long threads arrive whole — Mastodon quietly truncates deep threads, and Ariadne keeps fetching until it can prove it has reached the end

NO ACCOUNT, NO SERVER

Ariadne has no login and no account. It talks only to the instance named in the link you shared, anonymously, the way your browser would. Nothing is sent to us, because there is no us to send it to. Nothing is kept once the export is in your hands. There is no tracking and there are no analytics.

Ariadne reads public Mastodon posts. Followers-only and private posts, and instances that require you to be signed in, are not accessible to it.

Named for the thread that led Theseus back out of the labyrinth.