tldr: Use the Mastodon API Tester to play with the Client API of Mastodon.
I’ve created the WordPress plugin called Enable Mastodon Apps which does a seemingly small but powerful thing: it enables you to access your WordPress blog using Mastodon apps like Tusky or Ivory. This can be used to browse your own blog and post to it. If you also have the Friends plugin and the ActivityPub plugin installed, this will actually make your WordPress blog behave like a Mastodon instance.
It does this be re-implementing the Mastodon API (unfortunately, Mastodon didn’t opt to implement the ActivityPub client-server API so this is not based on a standard) which can be tricky: it uses REST API endpoints in the (virtual) directories /oauth and /api which are so generic that they are prone to conflicts.
Additionally, although the API is well documented, many apps were created based on assumptions that are true for Mastodon itself (which caused a lot–sometimes hard to reproduce–of issues for the plugin). For example, the id of a post or a user is defined as a string but many apps crash when you put a non-number there. Or that a boosted toot needs to have a different id than the virtual “wrapping” toot (Ivory!). In such cases, apps would crash but work fine with Mastodon itself.
Even more complicated are interactions with other WordPress plugins. It can be hard to understand if the plugin is working correctly, if another plugin is interfering, the hosting provider acts quirky, or if the Mastodon app has an incompatibilty with my implementation.
Thus I have created a simple one-page JS app called Mastodon API Tester hosted on Github pages (source on Github):
I hope that this tool will help identify issues better in future, it can also be used with GotoSocial or a “real” Mastodon instance. Feel free to report issues you might encounter.
PS: the Enable Mastodon Apps plugin will be worked on at the Cloudfest Hackathon, thanks Matthias Pfefferle for taking the lead on this! (Unfortunately, I cannot make it there because I’ll be speaking at WordCamp Asia in Taipei just the weekend before that.)