Improve followers feature : consider more interactions

[lapineige]

Hello,

I really like the followers feature https://github.com/kensanata/mastodon-archive#followers as a semi-automated cleanup tool. It adds some nice improvement over Mastodon integrated feature (that did not exist at the time you created this) as it allows to filter interactions older than a given time (only 1 month in Mastodon).

I would like to suggest some improvements:

• as of Mastodon, the ability to filter followers-only, or mutual.
• as of Mastodon, the ability not to block, but to remove the follow (with or without removing the following). As an user, in many cases I don't want to block the person, so they can come back afterwards and ask for a follow again
• include favourites and possibly boosts in the interactions. It help both to detect lurking bots/accounts (which tends not to interact at all) and to allow people who are following "just to listen"/to be able to read private conversation mentioning you.
• include mentions, not only the incoming ones as of right now, but also when we mention them. This also helps distinguishing between real accounts and the rest.
• find a way to exclude secondary accounts and migrated ones ? Those obviously won't interact often, but you might want to keep them. I don't even know if we can easily find the migrated ones with or without an API request. As a minimum, maybe we could exclude any same-pseudo matching account, that would reduce the number of false positives.

The goal of all of these additions is to reduce the number of "false positives" reported, to speed up the sorting process. As you explained in your original blogpost, this function can give a massive list of account, and its hard to decide to block them all or time-consuming to review them all.

I'm documenting this here, as I might work on it in the future but don't have time now, just in case someone would like to help… :slightly_smiling_face:

Let me know what you think.

Have a nice day :)

[kensanata]

It sounds interesting, for sure! Specially if this is how we can get advanced features to other servers, like GoToSocial.

[lapineige]

Specially if this is how we can get advanced features to other servers, like GoToSocial.

I don't really get your point.

Does that mean you want/plan to be able to archive other fediverse software content, or any Mastodon-API compatible software ?

[kensanata]

Yes, as long as the server supports the Mastodon Client API, mastodon-archive should be able to handle it. And I personally use a single person GoToSocial. But in that case the copy of the database is already in my hands so perhaps I’ll write a different set of tools instead. 😅

[lapineige]

Yes, as long as the server supports the Mastodon Client API, mastodon-archive should be able to handle it.

That's great !!