A simple Python script to find inactive follows

With Hive account@steem-ua now a thing, if you're participating it's going to be important to keep your following list a little bit clean. I knew I had a lot of people from when I first started on Steem who had gone inactive in recent months, and I wanted to find them, so I wrote a little Python program to make a list for me.

I chose to use 40 days as my standard, and check for accounts I'm following who hadn't made a post or comment in that amount of time. A lot of people have had autoclaim rewards and autovoting set up through one service or another, and those might still be running, so I didn't want to include those things in my activity count.

from steem import Steem
from steem.account import Account
from dateutil.parser import parse
import datetime

account = "tcpolymath"
time_period = datetime.timedelta(days=40)
current_time = datetime.datetime.now()

following = Account(account).get_following()

for user in following:
        time_posted = parse(Account(user)["last_post"])
        if current_time - time_posted > time_period:
                print user

(Updated to be even simpler after suggestion from Hive account@markgritter.)

In order to use this you'll have to install steem-python, change the username from mine to the account whose inactive follows you want to see, and change the "days=40" if you want a different time period.

I initially thought about just auto-unfollowing, but that seemed like a bad idea; there are a few accounts on there that I knew I wanted to keep following for one reason or another, and I expected there would be some I didn't think of. So I just had it make a list and reviewed them myself.

That also gave me the opportunity to send out a few emails to artists I really wish would come back, in the course of things, which is good. I had meant to write to Hive account@timmolloy, but also sent emails to Hive account@beauwhiteart and Hive account@captainyeeha, if anyone wants to back them up with their own. All of their websites are on their profiles, and have contact forms.

Two users who don't have contact info were once the most prolific animal-related posters here, Hive account@amavi and Hive account@photofan, so I may take the opportunity to write a little more about animals this fall with that niche open.

I ended up unfollowing 59 inactive accounts, about one-sixth of the total number of people I was following.