A Bittersweet Cleanup: Automating My Hive Following List

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).

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.

• 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.

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.

• GitHub Gist: https://gist.github.com/TheCrazyGM/9e65273243bb4382c424a01ca46810af
• Example Command: POSTING_WIF=5XX.. uv run https://gist.github.com/TheCrazyGM/9e65273243bb4382c424a01ca46810af

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

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