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The Mastodon lane publishes to your account on a single instance. It publishes only once a Mastodon credential is present in your .env; until then the lane is live-but-unauthenticated and waits for you to connect it (set PENDPOST_MODE=mock to exercise it through the mock driver). You own your Mastodon account and are responsible for both your instance’s rules and Mastodon’s terms of service. pendpost drafts and schedules, but a human approves before anything goes live.

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Setup ceremony

Mastodon is federated: your account lives on one instance, and the engine talks to that instance’s API directly with an application access token. There is no developer program and no review.
  1. Pick your instance. Record the base URL of the instance your account lives on, for example https://mastodon.social.
  2. Create an application. Log in to that instance in a browser and open Preferences > Development > New application. Name it (for example pendpost), grant the read, write:statuses, and write:media scopes, and save. No callback URL is needed; the engine uses the application’s own access token.
  3. Copy the access token. Open the application you just created and copy “Your access token”. It is static and does not expire unless you regenerate it.
Then validate. It calls verify_credentials, confirms the token authenticates, and records your handle:

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Environment variables

A lane publishes only once its credential is present. If the Mastodon variables are blank, the Mastodon lane is live-but-unauthenticated and waits for you to connect it. Set PENDPOST_MODE=mock to exercise it through the mock driver.

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Validate the lane

A present credential is not the same as a working one. After setup, validate the Mastodon lane in the Setup tab, or run a live probe with the health_recheck tool, to confirm the credential is live and not just configured. The lane is ready when it reports live.
Over MCP. Setup and rotation are an interactive human ceremony; secrets are never written through MCP. An agent can still check status (account_status), run a live liveness probe (health_recheck), and read non-secret config (config_get) over MCP without touching credentials.

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Common failures