Hi! This is a tool that allows you to view your Mastodon export file. Just click “select a file” on the main page, choose your Mastodon archive (with .zip or .tar.gz extension) and enjoy!
To export all your posts in Mastodon, go to Preferences > Import and export, click “request your archive” and wait for it to become available for download.
In case you want more flexibility than Mastodon's built-in export offers, you can optionally use Meow with Mastodon Archive, a tool that can download your data from Mastodon (and, theoretically, Pleroma; that setup hasn't been tested) without using the export feature. Which means that the one export per week limit doesn't apply to it. Additionally, it lets you see followers-only stars and boosts (though not bookmarks), which is impossible to do using built-in export. However, it requires a somewhat more complicated setup, and so is more suitable for advanced users.
For setup instructions, refer to the readme. After you install it and create your archive, just run mastodon-archive meow <username@your.instance> and follow the instructions. Meow will import your posts and show them in your browser!
A: The file you export from your Mastodon profile doesn't contain your starred posts, it only has links to them. Meow tries to download those posts from the instances they're located on. So if the post author has deleted it or the instance is down (or some other network error ocurred), meow shows an error.
A: This version was built on December 23 2023, 07:27 UTC
A: That shouldn't happen, your archive is probably too large. I haven't seen this happen before, please, report the bug to me (see the next section). (As you might've already guessed, some of these frequently asked questions were never actually asked, and I hope that this question will remain being one of them.)
A: Tag @meowViewer@toot.cafe on Mastodon. Preferably in a public post, but followers-only and direct messages are ok, too.
A: Here was a text explaining the limitations of the search engine. However, I'm happy to announce that they don't apply to Meow anymore! It now supports full-text search and will find substrings in words and such.
A: Meow attempts to only count meaningful words, as you wouldn't want to see “a”, “the” and “is” at the top of the list. However, our list of stopwords isn't perfect, so some may slip through the filter.
Only English words are filtered. In other languages, all words are counted.
A: Post links usually have long numbers at the end. Paste this number into the search box, click “go” and your post should be there.
A: You can use Tab to jump from one element to another, enter to activate them, arrow keys to switch pages.
A: No, meow doesn't send your posts anywhere, they are processed locally on your computer. However, meow needs to connect to foreign servers to fetch remote emoji, images and starred posts. We also use GoatCounter analytics, it doesn't log any personally identifying information (a hash of your IP address, user agent and a random number is logged together with the page address and some data about your browser).
Meow is not open-source (yet?), so if you're asking yourself whether you can trust meow, you aren't wrong to question it. To verify that your data isn't sent anywhere, you can open your browser's devtools and go to the network tab. It should show all the network requests.
A: UI framework: Vue.js
IndexedDB wrapper: Dexie.js
Gzip library: Pako
Zip library: zip.js
Date/time display: dayjs
Date picker: js-datepicker
HTML processing: DOMPurify
Calendar and reply icons: Font Awesome (license)
Charting library: Chart.js
CSS framework: Bootstrap with a modified Darkly theme
Search engine: FlexSearch
A: Mastodon Archive Tool is a tool for searching posts.
mastodon-data-viewer.py is an offline tool for viewing and searching posts and attachments. It is written in Python and requires installation.
mastodon-archive-viewer is another offline tool for viewing posts. It supports filters for boosts, posts with media, replies, etc. It is written in OCaml and requires installation.
Mastodon Archive (GitHub) is an offline tool that allows you to make an archive of your statuses, favourites and media in both. From the archive, it can generate a simple text file or an HTML file with or without media. Unlike Meow and all of the previously mentioned tools, it doesn't depend on the built-in Mastodon export functionality.
If you find another piece of software that works with Mastodon export archives, please tell me!