Sometimes a creator loses touch with how people use their creation. I worry that Eugen Rochko has found himself in a bubble and doesn’t understand why the rest of us like Mastodon. Eugen and friends released the new official Mastodon for iPhone app, and users noticed that it doesn’t show local or federated timelines. He responded: The omission is intentional and I do not intend to add these types of timelines into the app.

If you’re using Mastodon on an iPhone, you’re probably using the excellent Amaroq client. For some very good reasons, it doesn’t have a built-in feature to translate toots into your own language. That’s OK, though. We can implement that ourselves!

This will walk you through the process of installing Workflow on your iPhone, then configuring Amaroq to use it to translate toots from your timeline. There are a lot of steps here, but most of them are for the one-time setup. Don’t worry: you won’t have to do all of these every time you want to read something written in French.