Exfiltrating My Friend List from LinkedIn

I’d really like to manage my friend list outside of any walled garden. It’s probably unrealistic to do it, but that’s never stopped me from trying, so let’s see what it might look like.

I’ll start by listing where I have friend lists already:

• My Contacts in iCloud
• LinkedIn
• Signal
• Mastodon
• X (I haven’t been active there in a long time)
• Other historical locations that I have long since forgotten

Naturally my friend list never looks the same in any of these places. Sometimes I have an email address but more often than not I have their walled-garden handle and maybe their name. From this I need to form some sort of filtered combined list with all of the attributes that I know, and then I need to reach out to each person and explain what I’m trying to do and either get their consent to play along and provide me with their current contact information or get their refusal (which is totally fine).

I’ve started with part 1 today on LinkedIn by requesting a full export of my LinkedIn data. I also have my iCloud contacts which is straightforward to work with. I’ll probably just do those two at first, try to put together some sort of useful list and reach to a few of my favorite people who are most likely to say yes and go from there. More to come…