Isaac's Blog

I run my own Mastodon instance at isaacsu.com. (Not anymore) Over time, it accumulates avatar and header files of accounts that I do not care about in the live/public/system/accounts directory, and it gets quite large.

Here's a Rails console script that I use to purge them every now and again. There's one method unused_accounts that tries to assemble a whitelist of account_ids that I've ever interacted with and returns a list of accounts that are not them.

1. Start by booting up Rails console for mastodon

cd ~/live
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails console

2. Define the unused_accounts method

Paste this code block into Rails console.

def unused_accounts
  favourites = Favourite.all
      .map{ |f| f.account_id }
      .uniq
  favourite_statuses = Favourite.all
      .map{ |f| [f.status.account_id, f.status.in_reply_to_account_id] }
      .flatten.uniq
  follows = Follow.all
      .map{ |f| [f.account_id, f.target_account_id] }
      .flatten.uniq
  notifications = Notification.all
      .map{ |n| [n.account_id, n.from_account_id] }
      .flatten.uniq
  poll_votes = PollVote.all
      .map{ |p| p.poll.account_id }
      .flatten.uniq

  activities = (favourites + favourite_statuses + follows + notifications + poll_votes)
      .uniq

  replied = Status.where(account_id: activities, reply: true)
      .map{ |s| s.in_reply_to_account_id }
      .uniq

  reblogged = Status.where(account_id: (activities+replied).reject(&:nil?), reply: true)
      .reject{ |s| s.reblog_of_id.nil? }
      .map{ |s| Status.find(s.reblog_of_id).account_id }
      .uniq

  all = (activities + replied + reblogged).reject(&:nil?).uniq

  Account.where.not(id: all)
end

3. Suspend them

Paste this code block into Rails console.

unused_accounts.each do |account|
  puts "#{account.username} #{account.domain}"
  SuspendAccountService.new.call(account, destroy: true)
end

A most recent run freed up 4GB of disk space. bin/tootctl media remove --days=5 helped reclaim another ~3GB on top of that.

Hope someone else finds this useful. I should note that this worked on Mastodon v2.9.2. There's no guarantee that it will work in future or past versions.

Please use this toot for questions, comments or expressions of gratitude.