@alwynispat Yes, that's exactly it. If Mastodon added the same functionality into the core system, they may be able to preserve the date — it would be the developers themselves coding that, and presumably they will be able to make safe changes to any code that touches the database (especially given that it wouldn't involve any changes to the database structure). But the tool I wrote only uses the standard API and reposted posts are essentially new posts, with new dates.