How do people meaningfully search and/or export their #Mastodon favourites? I've been favouriting (not bookmarking) a bunch of useful and/or interesting stuff since I came here, but the data seems difficult to access in a useful way.
When I use my instance's website, there's no search facility on the Favourites page. It only loads a subset of favourites upfront, so without pressing the "load more" button hundreds of times, I can't use my screen reader's find feature either.
When I try the favourites timeline of Semaphore, it also only loads a subset of my favourites, but apparently without a means of loading more of them.
In Mona on iOS, I would likewise have to keep finding, and then pressing, "load more posts".
When I try to find information on the internet about possible qualifiers for searching my own favourites, I get results about API calls and installing Elasticsearch as an instance owner.
In the "import/export" section of my account preferences, it doesn't say anything about favourites, and doesn't make it clear whether my posts archive would include them.
For people following along at home, I have two replies so far telling me I'm using #Mastodon wrong. In 10 minutes on a Sunday. Impressive.
I found a #Mastodon archiver (https://github.com/kensanata/mastodon-archive). But while it has a `--no-favourites` flag, it doesn't have the reverse (i.e. skip my own posts and only download my favourites). It doesn't seem reasonable, in terms of instance server load, to grab a bunch of data just to throw most of it away.
There's also an unexpectedly large number of tools to export #Mastodon data to #Prometheus. I'm not sure I even understand what Prometheus is, nor why so many people apparently want to export Mastodon data to it.
Some replies have suggested using "in:library" as a search qualifier. Unfortunately, no matter what I specify after it, my instance claims there are no matches.
So, I'm going ahead and using the aforementioned archival tool. I don't like that it's hitting the API to obtain a lot of data that I don't want or need, but I think I've legitimately tried hard enough (short of modifying the software itself) to avoid it.
To those who've pointed out that I should've probably been using bookmarks all along: those can indeed be exported from the account preferences section on my instance. Unfortunately:
1. I haven't been using them all along; and
2. the CSV only includes post URLs, no text or metadata, so still can't be searched, and hence doesn't come close to solving the problem of searching them.
In the end, it took me over an hour to extract one link from my #Mastodon favourites, as someone who already had a Python environment set up ready to run an archival tool without much fuss.