Question: how to fetch information about a user

[pietervdvn]

Hi,

For my bot, I republish changes that have been made on OpenStreetMap automatically and I do ping people if they have their Mastodon set on OpenStreetMap.

However, I don't want to ping people who indicate that they don't like bots. They do this by setting the "no-bot"-field on their profile. However, I'm struggling to fetch the profile of a user.

I tried await instance.v1.accounts.fetch("@[email protected]") and await instance.v1.accounts.fetch("@pietervdvn").

What am I doing wrong?

[neet]

According to the Mastodon doc:

:id
REQUIRED String. The ID of the Account in the database.
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/accounts/#get

Therefore the id parameter is the ID of the account which is different from a username. It consists of 18 digits of integer and should look like 109385598812984542. The value is different in each instance because each instance has its own database.

If you don't know the ID of the target account or don't want to hard-code the ID, you might be able to use v1.accounts.lookup for getting a profile from the username. c.f.

const acct = await masto.v1.accounts.lookup({
  acct: '@[email protected]',
});
console.log(`ID: ${acct.id}`);

I hope this helps

[pietervdvn]

Thanks! I initially used masto.v1.accounts.lookup('@[email protected]'); instead of wrapping it in an object with `{acct: }