ephemetoot is a Python command line tool for deleting old toots.

These docs apply to ephemetoot version 3.

These instructions use the command pip - depending on your setup you may need to use pip3 instead.

If you are upgrading from an ephemetoot version prior to v3.0.0 please see the upgrading instructions and note that you need to manually uninstall the old version first.

• Installation
• Options
• Upgrading and uninstalling
• Contributing

Prior work

The initial ephemetoot script was based on this tweet-deleting script by @flesueur

ephemetoot relies heavily on the Mastodon.py package by @halcy

Usage

You can use ephemetoot to delete Mastodon toots that are older than a certain number of days (default is 365). Toots can optionally be saved from deletion if:

• they are pinned; or
• they include certain hashtags; or
• they have certain visibility; or
• they are individually listed to be kept

Rate limits

As of Mastodon v2.7.2 the Mastodon API has a rate limit of 30 deletions per 30 minutes. mastodon.py automatically handles this. If you are running ephemetoot for the first time and/or have a lot of toots to delete, it may take a while as the script will pause when it hits a rate limit, until the required time has expired. You can use the --pace flag to slow down ephemetoot so that it never hits the limit - this is recommended on your first run. It will not speed up the process but will smooth it out.

Note that the rate limit is per access token, so using ephemetoot for multiple accounts on the same server shouldn’t be a big problem, however one new user may delay action on subsequent accounts in the config file.

ASCII / utf-8 errors

Prior to Python 3.7, running a Python script on some BSD and Linux systems may throw an error. This can be resolved by:

• setting a locale that encodes utf-8, by using the environment setting PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8 when running the script, or
• upgrading your Python version to 3.7 or higher. See Issue 11 for more information.

Contributing

For all bugs, suggestions, pull requests or other contributions, please check the contributing guide.

License

This project and all contributions are licensed under the GPL 3.0 or future version