The import command

The import command is used to ingest the content from a Mastodon export into the SQLite database and extract media attachments. It's used like so:

cd my-mastodon-site
fossilizer import ../archive-20230720182703-36f08a7ce74bbf59f141b496b2b7f457.tar.gz

Depending on the size of your export, this command should take a few seconds or minutes to extract all the posts and attachments.

Along with inserting database records, you'll find files like the following added to your data directory, including all the media attachments associated with the export under a directory based on the SHA-256 hash of the account address:

my-mastodon-site/
└── data
    ├── data.sqlite3
    ├── media
    │   └── acc0bb231a7a2757c7e5c63aa68ce3cdbcfd32a43eb67a6bdedffe173c721184
    │       ├── avatar.png
    │       ├── header.jpg
    │       └── media_attachments
    │           └── files
    │               ├── 002
    │               │   ├── ...
    │               ├── 105
    │               │   ├── ...
    │               ├── 106
    │               │   ├── ...

You can run this command repeatedly, either with fresh exports from one Mastodon instance or with exports from many instances. All the data will be merged into the database from previous imports.

After you've run this command, you can try the build command to generate a static web site.