# My quest towards a public scrapebook

## Objective

At the beginning of the year, I embarked on this social network journey. The actual motivation is to find a semi-public place to collect some of my thoughts, bookmarks, quips and other trivia. The immediate inspiration was the description of thoughts summarizing/exploration workflow (creative soup there) at [Ribbonfarm](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/12/31/2020-ribbonfarm-extended-universe-annual-roundup/) by @vgr.

Objective: _I am trying to establish a public personal scrapbox in which half-baked and nuclear ideas can be kept, sharpened, collected and from time to time something smarter might emerge and that I want to properly publish in a polished form._ Kind of a wiki, editing of which would be strictly additive (because I think that way, I don't feel an urge to edit) and extremely simple using established and low-friction tooling.

Why I feel a need for it at all and for it to be somewhat public is a discourse for another time.

My starting point actually was an idea to start a simple static blog (Jekyll?). Privately, since more than a year I anyway keep a whole zoo of hudnreds of private notes in Markdown written in QOwnNotes and Obsidian (because since many months I cannot decide which I like better) synced by QNAP Sync (and OwnCloud) between my devices. Footnote: actually I am a paper person and since more than 10 years I keep paper notebooks with notes for work.

The problems with maintaining a plain static blog were for me twofold:
1. I am looking for a very low threshold posting experience (e.g., while I am walking - and I do a lot of that - and want to remember something, or note a silly thought - i.e., must work with desktop/laptop and phone). Static blog requires a workflow via editor, generator, git, publishing, etc. Lots of hasssle there.
2. I am looking for at least some minimal feedback. Otherwise the exercise would be a pure self-satisfactory aggrandisement and I do not need that any more. I.e., I would like at least some basic commenting facility.

## Path to Mastodon

Then I stumbled upon the [blog post about adding Mastodon comments to static blog](https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-static-blog-with-mastodon/) by @carl. That led me to Mastodon.

Mastodon in general and the setup at qoto.org instance specifically, looked to me as a potentially useful direction to explore. Mastodon user timeline/wall can be treated as the public face of the scrapbox, while the comments inside could enrich the scrapbox content and provide either entertainment, intellectual sharpening, or both. At the same time qoto.org allows me to write lengthy entries with rich formatting (and much more on top, but these two features are relevant for my objective). Fedilab, toot and Qoto web interface are easy tools making the whole process easy for me. And I do not care much that sometimes it's not exactly elegant, or nice, it just works(tm).

So far, the experiment led to interesting insights and yet more questions including: shall I run my own instance? (really?), instance of what? (writefreely, friendica, qoto clone, pleroma, etc.), etc. When I arrive to some conclusions, I might write it up at some late point.

## Keeping more permanent records

The scrapbook/shoebox place is meant to be more of a log and a collection out of which some more coherent ideas shall emerge. Question arises where to put those better worked out ideas? Of course I already have a couple, but I keep them private and therefore also somewhat less polished. A blog would be indeed in order.

So here I am again at the static blog idea, but this time only for the worked out ideas and/or with less friction:
1. record into Mastodon easily from anywhere; and
2. automatically archive my account's public timeline in some more permanent place under my control.

### Design sketch

Enter extration of toots from Mastodon and further processing. I started to explore how to extract public toots from Mastodon into my own archive. Apart from directly using Mastodon API, people obviously solved that problem already:
- [Mastodon Archive](https://github.com/kensanata/mastodon-backup): involved script which can do a lot. The problem here is the Mastodon API rate limiting. TODO: Needs more exploration.
- [MastoUserScrape.py](https://gist.github.com/FlyMyPG/2e9d4532453182ada0da78e74980193b)]: small Python script scraping the public HTML side of the Mastodon's user profile. No login, just very basic HTML parsing. With little effort, I made it work against qoto.org. Some minor issues remain, like embedded toots, etc. _Very promissing!_
- of ourse I could also scrape the RSS feed of the user profile. Easy too, but only a limited number of toots can be exacted that way (front-page+).

I could extract toots every couple of hours and then use Jekyll/git to push them to the static page at my space.

## Forgetting

Now, the author of Mastodon Archive tool is @kensanata and in the tool he built in also an interesting feature to [delete/expire toots](https://github.com/kensanata/mastodon-backup#expiring-your-toots-and-favourites). He mentions there other tools and links to his own write-up about [record keeping](https://alexschroeder.ch/wiki/2017-04-27_Record_Keeping).

That turn out to be a whole new interesting direction. Alex is right there, old traces of one's digital past shall be under one's control. I agree with his policy (also on his profile) to automatically delete old toots. If I stick with Mastodon, I think I will implement it too - besides scraping and keeping for myself, or potentially keeping them published under my own control.