that would require me to know what programming is, unfortunately.

That said, with the way mastodon.py deals with fetching statuses (20 item "pages" all the time every time (unless theres a way to reduce the size or something i haven't seen)), comparing it to like the 40 newest lines in the corpus should hopefully be enough to reduce un-necessary fetches to at most like 2 in the worst case scenario. fwiw i'm only planning to update it like once a month and im def gonna do it manually least i fucked something up lol