Cleantoots - Clean Your Toot History

Cleantoots - Clean Your Toot History
Photo by No Revisions / Unsplash
💡
This feature is now built into Mastodon.

Since I consider my messages on social media to be valid at the moment they're posted, I like to have them deleted after some time. When I still used Twitter, I also used a CLI tool called cleantweets that helped with this.

A few months ago, after having created an account on Fosstodon, I wrote a simple command line utility to help you achieve the same thing but with toots: cleantoots (notice how much effort I put into naming it).

As with most of my side-projects, the code source is released under a free software and open source license, here I used the GPL-3.0.

Since it's written in Python, I also released a Python package to help with the installation process, so a simple python -m pip install cleantoots should do the trick. The rest of the configuration and setup process can be found in the project's README.

You can easily configure the tool to:

  • Delete old toots
  • Keep popular toots (with a minimum number of favorites/boosts)
  • Keep toots given their ID
  • Keep toots containing a hashtag (recent addition)

And as Mastodon is a federated social network and you may have multiple accounts on multiple instances, the configuration file allows that too.

I think the project is usable but it may be improved at least in two ways:

  • Increase the test coverage
  • Refactor the code to make it clearer and add some comments to help contributors

Please don't hesitate to open an issue on the repository if you have any question, need help using it, find a bug or request a feature! 😀

I wrote this as part of 100DaysToOffload, this is the 8th post.