Mastodon: Simple HTML file for analyzing/displaying account export data

Created on 7 Dec 2018 · 9Comments · Source: tootsuite/mastodon

Pitch

@Gargron: There is nothing in the archive that you could really make a use of without a specialized tool of some sort. There's images and JSON files.
@ccoenen: Twitter does something very nice, in my opinion: they have this tiny html thing that can (I guess?) parse the JSON. This would be a separate feature request, though. It would add tremendous value to the export.

IMHO it can be very simple at first; maybe just links or so. At least Firefox e.g. displays the JSON in it's nice JSON viewer when you access one like this.

Motivation

Just as @Gargron said, it would make a quick look into the data easier without special tools. So this would help less technical users, who may just want to have a look into it.

suggestion

Source

rugk

👍2

Most helpful comment

Well, to get back to the original issue at hand: the idea was to _also_ have somthing human readable. There are lots of reasons, why this might be a good idea, in my opinion.

I might switch instances and/or an instance goes down (and one can't import toots right now, so I would not have any "end user compatible" way to look at my archive)
I might want to no longer be part of the fediverse, but _still_ look at things I wrote years ago.
I may want to give a collection of my toots to someone
Maybe my internet connection is flaky and I'd rather have an offline reference

So while I think, an export _could_ potentially serve both export/import, I _also_ believe that this can be a totally separate thing that has nothing to do with the existing export at all.

Earlier, I suggested just adding a JS alongside the JSON file. Again: that's adding a tiny amount of storage (zipped up probably next to nothing, _at least_ compared to the media files that are _also_ in there). And it's automated and a one-way operation so there's no real practical reason _not_ to do this.

BTW: the reason the JS works, where the JSON does not: one can just add a script tag for JS files, but one needs a XHR-Request for JSON, and that's where the sandbox comes into play. This has been the case for a number of years, but not in all browsers.