Keith Novak

Here’s a cool trick I picked up via the Github page for GoToSocial as I’m working my way through their server software. The software is somewhat in it’s infancy and some core features are still missing – among them, migrating accounts and taking your social graph with you. That means if you spin up a new GoToSocial instance, you have to rebuild your timeline, one account at a time.

Of course, that isn’t cool or practical for anyone who has been a fediverse user for more than a few weeks – I follow in excess of 500 accounts. Luckily, using the toot cli tool, you can easily import your followers list.

The process is highlighted in the Github thread, but here is how I did it, step by step (on a Debian 12 machine – ymmv on other systems):

apt install toot
toot login
touch import.sh
chmod +x import.sh

apt install toot should be self-explanatory, we are installing the toot tool which is Mastodon API tool for your terminal. toot login is how you authenticate to your home Mastodon (or Akkoma, Firefish, etc. server – anything that supports Mastodon API).

You don’t explicitly need to, but I create the fileimport.sh before I started using it. I also provide the correct permissions to import.sh so it can be executed.

In your import.sh file, you’ll need the following code that was originally posted by rsolvang:

#!/bin/env bash
while read LINE; do
        user=${LINE%%,*}
        toot follow $user
done < friends.csv

friends.csv is an export from my akkoma web front-end that was a complete print out of everyone I’m following, into a .csv format. I used scp to copy it to my GoToSocial server. Once that is set, just run ./import.sh (assuming your friends.csv file is in the same working directory) and you will be set. It does take some time to execute, maybe 5 minutes for my 500+ count list.