77 days ago · Writing · 0 comments

In the shower this morning, one of those stupid thoughts formed itself in my mind: I wonder what the entire corpus of toots looks like, in alphabetical order? I can sort of answer this: I'm one of the admins of mathstodon.xyz, a big-ish Mastodon instance. I could run a query to get the text from every toot the server is aware of. The immediate concern that arises is whether this could reveal any private information. I don't think it would unless I do it twice in quick succession and someone recreates a private toot from the difference between the two, but just to be safe I've done it on just my posts. I ran this query on the postgres database: sudo -u postgres psql mastodon_production -c "copy (select text from statuses where account_id=1) to '/tmp/cp_statuses.csv';" (a normal mastodon user who doesn't have direct database access could request an export of their account data and wait a few minutes) That produced a CSV file with a row containing the text of each post. Then I sorted…

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