Why fediback

A Mastodon instance can go down, and can die. This happens.

That's why users should always have essential information backuped on their own computer, most essentially their list of following and of followers.

With those lists, they can start a new account if necessary, even if their old one is unreachable, and follow again the same users, and notify people who were following them of their new account.

Install

From source

You must have the Rust environnement installed: https://rustup.rs

Run

cargo install fediback

From precompiled binaries

Executables for Windows and Linux are included in the releases published on GitHub.

Usage

You first tell Fediback what account(s) you want to save, with fediback add <user> where user can be a user url or @user@instance:

You can add who you want: only public data is fetched.

To backup all selected accounts, run fediback update:

Accounts are fetched in parallel.

This operation can be done manually but there's no harm in having a cron rule if you can.

For each account 4 JSON files are saved on disk:

• user.json with the core account data
• followers.json with a list of users
• following.json with a list of users too
• featured.json with a list of "pinned" messages

Licence

MIT - Enjoy