When viewing posts in a logged-out GUI browser and there is a need to
interact with some arbitrary post, toot is nearly useless. All the
toot interaction commands rely on having a local msg ID which may or
may not exist. And even when it exists it’s sometimes impossible to
obtain. It’s a serious hassle to search hashtags within /toot/ in
attempt to reveal the local msg ID. If no hashtag exists & the user is
unknown to the local instance, toot users are stuffed.

The web client is capable of searching using the URL of an external
post as the query. If a local copy of the msg does not exist, it is
imported so users can interact with it. Toot needs this import
capability. Running this:

  $ toot search "$URL_to_post"

yields the response “nothing found”. Running:

  $ toot timeline --help

reveals that there is no way to specify an URL to a post, only tags or
the typical timeline selections. Ideally users should be able to run:

  $ toot search "$URL_to_post"

and it should either respond with:

  “that post has a local copy with an ID of 1234…”

OR

  “that post does not exist locally. Would you like to import it? [Y/n]”