A Bittersweet Cleanup: Automating My Hive Following List

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Hey everyone,

I was reading @holoz0r's excellent post, "nine years of loss - reflections on Hive/Steem," and it got me thinking. He mentioned he was manually pruning his following list, and as someone who has also been on the chain for about 8.5 years, I felt that. It's easy for your following list to become cluttered with accounts that have long since gone inactive.

This inspired me to automate the process. I wrote a small Python script that scans your following list and identifies accounts that have been inactive for a set period (defaulting to one year).

Some help options.

A Safe, Two-Step Cleanup Process

The most important thing when building a tool like this is safety. You don't want to accidentally unfollow someone you meant to keep. To prevent this, the script operates in two distinct modes: Scan and Execute.

  • Scan Mode: When you first run the script, it scans your entire following list and generates a CSV file (inactive_accounts.csv) listing every account that has been inactive longer than your defined threshold.

That's 2/3 my following list!

  • Review and Execute: After the scan is complete, you can open the CSV file and review the list. If there are any inactive accounts you want to continue following, you simply mark them (y or 1) in the keep column. Once you're satisfied, you run the script again with the --execute flag, and it will unfollow only the accounts you haven't marked to keep.

There were some truly sad goodbyes.

A Bittersweet Cleanup

I have to admit, running the script for the first time was an interesting experience. It identified over 200 accounts on my list that have been silent for more than a year. Watching the script execute and the names scroll by was almost painful. Each name was a little reminder of a past interaction, a comment thread from years ago, or someone whose content I used to enjoy. It was a real walk down memory lane and a tangible representation of how communities evolve over time.

More Than Just Unfollowing

One thing I want to highlight is the script's usefulness even if you never use the --execute flag. The initial scan itself is a powerful reporting tool. It gives you a clean, sortable spreadsheet of every account you follow and the last time they were active. If you're a curator or just curious about who is still active in your feed, this report alone is incredibly valuable for getting a better understanding of your corner of the Hive ecosystem.

Get the Script

This approach gives you full control over the process and makes it easy to manage your following list without the tedious manual work.

You can find the script in the Gist below. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, you can run it directly from the URL using uv.

Just make sure to set your POSTING_WIF environment variable before running it.

As always,
Michael Garcia a.k.a. TheCrazyGM

dev python uv archon tribes proofofbrain pimp
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19 comments
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Is it possible to scan for accounts that have an authority set for an autovoter, too?

Be interesting to see how many "active" accounts have an autovoter, but no other activity.

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Well, I thought about that, so this checks two things, when was the last time they posted, and even if not posted when was the last time they comment. I purposely didn't look at votes or tx's as they could be automated.

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But, I could easily add voting to the mix and mark it differently.

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(Edited)

and yes, if i had a decent list of autovoters (which right now I think is only hive.vote / steemauto), i could check the authority of each account to see if they were included.

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(Edited)

Well, my thoughts are (I don't have time to do it though):

  1. Retrieve the followers (or following) of a given user -

  2. Aggregate a groupby of the "account_auths" under posting authorities (screenshot from block explorer)
    image.png

  3. Figure out which ones are belonging to auto vote services (or other services that enable them).

  4. et voila, an adhoc piece of analysis, that if performed on all active chain users (as opposed to followers / following ) a % of who doesn't give their authority to an autovoter

I could try to do it through hivesql, and its on my list, but I don't know if you have the will or time to do it.

It is merely to satisfy my own curiosity about people who may intend to mislead about being manual curators, while having authorities still listed. No names in mind, just a thought exercise.

(and yes, I'm aware there's tons of ways to automate voting locally using scripts, and this method wouldn't catch it all)

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(Edited)

I'm willing to write up a script and let it run to do that, do you want me to intentionally do your following/followers list or just run it against my own? Or i could just do it against every user.

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Feel free to post the script if you do it, that way, we can all check our own backyards :)

I can spin up a venv to run it, haven't played with this "modern" hive python stuff since beempy and making direct calls to the SPL APIs back in the day :D

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I think it is the case that we will "never" run out of things to work on! This is a fun (if a bit sad) one.

!PAKX
!PIMP
!PIZZA

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I've seen and known so many people come, remain active for a time, then disappear, never to be seen again. I'm sure that I'm following hundreds of now inactive accounts. I might have to give this a try. So the POSTING_WIF is the posting key? Thank you for another very, very useful tool, my friend. 😁 🙏 💚 ✨ 🤙

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It was truly sad to see some of the names flash by. But at the same time, I'm grateful of the new friends I've made as well.

yes POSTING_WIF is the posting key, that's the minimal auth needed to follow/unfollow, but it also gets the account by the key, so it knows what account to look at.

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I very much understand that, and I'm equally grateful for the new and not-so-new friends that I know now.

OK, perfect. I'll give this a go. The posting key isn't transmitted in clear text, is it? I figure no, but I just wanted to clarify. 😁 🙏 💚 ✨ 🤙

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No, it actually derives the public key and get's the account information from that. and then for the unfollowing part it uses it to sign the transactions before sending, it never leaves the ENV.

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Ah, OK, I see. I appreciate the explanation, brother, thank you. 😁 🙏 💚 ✨ 🤙

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