For #GPN19 my Mastodon instance fem.social wants to get all posts for this hashtag. Most users at this event are connected to the instance chaos.social.

Our solution

We have a script on one of our servers which streams all posts for specific hashtag from chaos.social and puts the URLs of those posts into the search entry of our own instance. Thus, the URLs will get fetched by our instance and the posts is added to our hashtag timeline.

Installation

pip3 install Mastodon.py
git clone https://github.com/clerie/mastodon-hashtag-spreader.git
cd mastodon-hashtag-spreader/
cp config.json.example config.json
nano config.json

Edit config for your needs.

python3 hashtag-spreader.py

Scopes

To get this script work, you need an application token on each instance you want to get connected to. The needed scopes are depending on the role of the instace.

Source

read:statuses

Drain

read:search