blurp

🚧 Status: ALPHA SOFTWARE 🚧

A GoToSocial status deletion tool. Given that this can completely destroy your status history, I'm not sure I really recommend it. However, it does Work For Me ™ blurp might be useful to you while we're waiting for #1442 to get implemented.

Install

It's ~ 3 MB in size. Only linux/amd64 is supported atm.

curl https://git.coopcloud.tech/decentral1se/blurp/raw/branch/main/blurp -o blurp
chmod +x blurp

Field notes on how deletion works in GoToSocial

🟡 How this exactly works seems to depend both on a shifting development sands of GtS (ALPHA SOFTWARE etc.) but also how other Fediverse softwares deal with deletion (e.g. Mastodon, also shifting sands). This is a best-effort explanation and might quickly be out of date. Help welcome! 🟡

• blurp delete will get you rate limited by your own instance. I temporarily solved this by turning off rate limiting, running the command and then turning rate limiting back on again. I could probably implement some backoff in the code but this is just easier.

• blurp delete will remove statuses but not media attachments immediately for local media. Remote media is removed immediately. Unattached local media is removed the next time the media cleaning job runs.

• "If your post gets boosted or otherwise transmitted to a server yours doesn't know about and then you delete, you'll only send deletes to servers yours knows about, so copies of your post will remain on those other third party servers. so you can't rely on a delete reaching everywhere your post has gone even if you assume that servers will honour delete requests. but nonetheless, a best effort to remote delete will happen" - sentynel (GoToSocial Help chat 💝)

• "And more servers should do what we do, which is when we attempt to refresh a status but found out it has been deleted we remove it" - kim (GoToSocial Help chat 💝)

• There is (afaict) an ongoing plan to implement "status tombstones" in GtS so that when a deleted status is requested, it will return 410 gone and then the requester will know it is time to delete any local copies.

• Be aware, "delete requests" will be sent to followers when you delete your statuses. This means you can end up spamming your fellow fedizens. It might be nice to run blurp at some "less busy" time period (but yanno, timezones, so 🤷) and or consider some form of rate limiting (TODO: #3 🙈)

Delete stuff 🔥

You'll need to log in first:

blurp login -u foo@bar.zone

You might want to archive stuff locally before deleting all the things:

blurp archive

See ./archive for every status (favourited, pinned, boosted, bookmarked etc.) connected with your account. All media attachments are downloaded alongside the status. Status content is dumped as a JSON file.

🔴 DANGER ZONE 🔴

To delete all statuses older than 2 weeks:

blurp delete

🔴 DANGER ZONE 🔴

ACK

Made possible by the good work of slurp.

License