ephemetoot-eliminare-vecchi.../README.md

2.6 KiB

A script for deleting old toots. Based partially on tweet-deleting script by @flesueur

Usage

You can use this script to delete Mastodon toots that are older than a certain number of days. By default it will keep any pinned toots, but you can change that in config.py if you want them to be deleted. You can also make a list toots that you want to save, by adding the ID numbers to the toots_to_save list in config.py (see point 9 below). The ID of a toot is the last part of its individual URL. e.g. for https://ausglam.space/@hugh/101294246770105799 the id is 101294246770105799

This script requires Python3, the mastodon.py package and an API access token.

Setup

  1. Install Python3 if you don't already have it

  2. Install the mastodon package: pip3 install mastodon.py

  3. Copy example.config.py to a new file called config.py (e.g. cp example.config.py config.py)

  4. Log in to your Mastodon account using a web browser

    1. Click the settings cog
    2. Click on Development
    3. Click 'NEW APPLICATION'
    4. Enter an application name, and give the app 'read' and 'write' Scopes
    5. Click 'SUBMIT'
    6. Click on the name of the new app
    7. Copy the 'access token' string
  5. Replace YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN_HERE in config.py with the access token string

  6. Set the base_url to match your mastodon server

  7. Set the days_to_keep to the number of days you want to keep toots before deleting them

  8. If you do not wish to keep all pinned toots regardless of age, change save_pinned to False

  9. If there are any other toots you want to keep, put the ID numbers (without quotes) in the toots_to_save list, separated by commas. For example:

    toots_to_save = [100029521330725397, 100013562864734780, 100044187305250752]

Running the script

Test mode

To do a test-run without actually deleting anything, run the script with the '--test' flag: python3 ephemetoot.py --test

Live mode

Run the script with no flags: python3 ephemetoot.py.

Depending on how many toots you have and how long you want to keep them, it may take a minute or two before you see any results.

To run automatically every day you could try using crontab:

  1. crontab -e
  2. @daily python3 ~/ephemetoot/ephemetoot.py

Bugs and suggestions

Please log an issue with as much detail as possible (but don't include your access token!). If you want to suggest any changes or improvements, log an issue or have a chat to me on Mastodon before lodging a pull request.

License

GPL 3.0+