my website
added the first actual blog post, and a link to the blog on the homepage
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src/blog/2025-09-16-mastodon-stats/content.djot
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src/blog/2025-09-16-mastodon-stats/content.djot
···
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Download a data export/data archive. On Mastodon and derivatives, go into Settings -> Import and export -> Export.
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Click "Request your archive" and wait for the download link. Open a terminal, install [jq](https://jqlang.org/)
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if you don't have it, navigate to your extracted archive, and run the following one--liner:
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`jq '.orderedItems[] | select(.type == "Create") | .object.tag | map(select(.type == "Mention")) | select(any) | .[].name' -r outbox.json | sort | uniq -c | sort -n`
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The output will be in the usual `uniq -c` format of `count item`, so how many times you've mentioned someone, then their username,
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sorted by count ascending (so your most "popular" accounts last).
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You can substitute `.name` in the jq filter for `.href` and get profile URLs instead of usernames.
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Swap out `.type == "Mention"` for `.type == "Hashtag"` and get a list of the hashtags you've used.
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Or pipe all of that into `wc -l` to see how many distinct accounts you've mentioned.
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I have no idea if this works on anything other than Mastodon, lmao.
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## why?
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I love cool statistics. I've been active on the Fediverse for three years at the time of writing,
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so this produced very accurate data of who I usually interact with, kind of like that fedicircle thing.
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Also because over those three years I've managed to amass some, oh, 1000 followers and follows each.
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(I used to follow back a _lot_ early on.)
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As it turns out, the timeline gets Very crowded, and to me, annoying, with those counts. Yay no algorithm.
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And despite being seemingly very famous, I have never really heard from most of these people in any way, or interacted
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with them, for that matter. A lot of these accounts just ended up dying.
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So I wanted to unfollow _most_ people from my list (and remove most of my followers), while also keeping my friends,
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the people I do actually interact with. Preferrably without initiating a denial--of--service attack on my instance.
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I thought about seeing how many likes my posts have gotten from different accounts, but that would require database
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access (which I don't have).
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Likes "given" to others are also out, as the `likes.json` file in the export only lists post URLs, so I'd need to query
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my instance a zillion times to see who each post belongs to. Suboptimal.
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Then I had an idea to just count how many times I've replied to different accounts. This is much simpler, as usually
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(not always, but usually is good enough here) posts in a reply chain will have all the users in the chain listed as
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mentions, and those replies are just there in the `outbox.json` file. I didn't even have to parse the post text, the
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format just has all the mentions for a given post neatly listed (with the used hashtags too).
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Then it's just a matter of writing a... kind of long jq filter and piping it into the usual sort | uniq -c | sort.
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TL;DR I just made a new account, and this ended up being only somewhat useful to check if I had forgotten about someone.
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Still, pretty data.
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src/blog/2025-09-16-mastodon-stats/meta.json
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src/blog/2025-09-16-mastodon-stats/meta.json
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-1
src/blog/template_index.html
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src/blog/template_index.html
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src/blog/template_page.html
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src/blog/template_page.html
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src/index.html
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src/index.html
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-3
src/style.css
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-3
src/style.css
···
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.tag {
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/* intentional swap */
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background-color: var(--color-fg);
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color: var(--color-bg);
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--fg: var(--color-bg);
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--bg: var(--color-fg);
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background-color: var(--bg);
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color: var(--fg);
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font-size: 0.9em;
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border-radius: 0.3rem;
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padding: 0.2rem 0.4rem;
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}
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-
.tag[data-tag="test"] { background-color: rgb(255, 112, 112); color: black; }
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.tag[data-tag='test'] { --bg: #f66151; --fg: #000; }
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.tag[data-tag='software'] { --bg: #8ff0a4; --fg: #000; }
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pre {
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padding: 1rem;