Masto-DL

Masto-DL is a script to archive your Mastodon history, toot-by-toot.

Present State

This script is in a very alpha state; it has been tested to not catch fire, but it may eat your kitten and/or /usr/bin. Use with care.

Basic Usage

masto-dl init <directory> will interactively configure the specified directory, saving the configuration as JSON in masto-dl.conf. If the directory is not specified, it will default to the current dir.

masto-dl run <directory> will begin downloading all your toots. Toots are saved under the specified directory below a directory structure of year/month/toot-id.json, eg. 2022/11/109385308583886341.json.

(NYI) masto-dl start <directory> will start a live bot which will archive your toots as they happen.

Detailed Usage

• create an Access Token: in the web UI, navigate to Settings > Development and create a New Applicaition
• Give it a name, made sure the read scope is checked (you can remove the other scopes if you want)
• After you submit that, click on your new application in the list and copy the code from beside Your Access Token.
• Back to the commandline, run npx masto-dl init and it will ask for your instance url and API token.
• Finally, npx masto-dl run will start downloading. You can add --verbose to get more feedback about what it's doing, or just let it go

Your toots will be archived to json files under a directory structure for the year, months, and toot ID, like yyyy/mm/12345.json - support for yaml is coming soon

Roadmap

• be smarter about where to look; cache and reuse the oldest_id and newest_id we've seen, so we can start looking in a reasonable place for newer and older toots
• more output formats - store toots as text or YAML