Searchodon

Search your own Mastodon archive

Twitter search always served (at least) two purposes for me: searching the whole site for whatever news was breaking (or attempting to work out what that day's Main Character had done), but also, searching my own Tweets. I understand the reasons why we don't generally have search on the Fediverse, but not being able to search my own posts was proving a pain. So:

Getting your archive

You should be able to get your archive from your Mastodon instance. For me, it's at https://mastodon.me.uk/settings/export.

Running this

You'll need docker installed, then:

Get the code

git clone https://github.com/pikesley/searchodon.git

Add your archive

cd searchodon
cp ~/Downloads/archive-197001010000-somehash.tar.gz archive/

Build the image

make build
make run

Index the Toots

We need to build a Whoosh index:

make refresh

Run the server

make serve

And there should be something happening at http://localhost:8000/

Indexing your Toots

At startup, it looks for a Whoosh index at toot_index, and if that doesn't exist, it:

• unpacks the (semantically) latest file under archive into toots, then
• runs the indexer

If you get a newer archive, you can force building of a new index with

make refresh

It looks terrible

This idea formed itself as I was riding my bike round Victoria Park this lunchtime, and I've basically lashed this whole thing together this afternoon - a valid use of my day off, I'm sure you'll agree. Anyway, if you have ideas about how to make the design look less shit, I'd really like to hear from you.