--- /dev/null
+Mastodonochrome is copyright 2023-2024 Simon Tatham. All rights
+reserved.
+
+Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
+obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files
+(the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction,
+including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge,
+publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software,
+and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so,
+subject to the following conditions:
+
+The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
+included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
+
+THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
+EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
+MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
+NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS
+BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN
+ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN
+CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
+SOFTWARE.
--- /dev/null
+# Mastodonochrome
+
+Mastodonochrome is a terminal-based Mastodon client, with a user
+interface modelled after [Monochrome BBS](https://www.mono.org/).
+
+## Features
+
+The reason I wrote Mastodonochrome is that I didn't know of any
+existing Mastodon client with all of the following features:
+
+* Runs in a terminal, so that I can use it over SSH.
+* Can be run continuously, and shows updates to your home timeline as
+ they appear.
+* Shows your notifications and your home timeline integrated into the
+ same user interface.
+* One-column interface. In particular, when showing URLs, display them
+ without any unrelated text to the left or right, so that they're
+ easy to paste from the terminal into a browser.
+
+I chose to mimic Monochrome in particular because it was a UI that I'm
+already familiar with and have well established finger-macros for,
+with all of those properties.
+
+If you're a past Mono user yourself, maybe you'll feel at home with
+this client. If you're not, but you still want the features in the
+bullet list above, maybe it will still be useful to you.
+
+## Status
+
+At present, Mastodonochrome is **SIGNIFICANTLY UNFINISHED**. I'm using
+it myself to read and post to Mastodon, but it lacks support for some
+important Mastodon features (in particular, locked accounts and media
+posting), and has UI deficiencies (draft posts, line-editing recall).
+
+Also, it has no online help yet, and no separate documentation either.
+So if you download and use it, be prepared to figure out what's going
+on by reading the source code.
+
+`TODO.md` contains a list of things I know aren't there yet.
+
+## Licence
+
+Mastodonochrome is free software, under the MIT licence. See the file
+`LICENCE` for the full licence text.
+
+## Source code note
+
+Mastodonochrome is my first ever Rust program. It started off in
+Python, but it was too slow, so I rewrote it in Rust. So the quality
+of the Rust is probably not great.
+
+Patches and help are welcome, but fair warning, it's probably less
+easy to work with than the average reasonably polished Rust code you
+might find on the Internet.