 Sooo as an experiment I have decided to start hosting my new fediverse bots on my own software rather than a Mastodon server like botsin dot space. If you follow @bottwosentencehorror you should at some point see posts in your timeline that are parodies of the "bad two sentence horror" Twitter account. They should look something like the attached image (though not with formatting if you're on vanilla Mastodon). 30 comments
 @samplereality it needs to be on a "boosted" paid project over there because the way that activitypub works you need an "always-on" server @darius Cool! I havenโt played around with paid projects on Glitchโฆyet. I guess theoretically if I could get Pleroma running on a Raspberry Pi, I could self host that wayโฆ Whoa, I just realized this means I could, in theory, create custom landing sites for every bot that is a little different. Like one could show a feed of past posts, one could only show the current post, one could show some content *based on* the latest posts, etc... hmmmmm Like, a "profile page" literally just a view on the database and there is no reason why I couldn't have different views for different accounts. We are so used to mainstream social media needing *consistency* but like my little bot server does not necessarily need that!  Btw this is an idea I first developed during my Mozilla Fellowship in 2018. Lots of stuff I've made since has led up to this: my Express ActivityPub Server, my RSS to ActivityPub Converter, my ActivityPub Debugging Tool, figuring out how to work with Glitch for ActivityPub hosting... of course then pandemic hit and I was not very productive 2020-2021 but wow this is neat to finally deploy the thing I've wanted to forever ago. Okay I built a landing page for the user account now, you can get to it via this url or just clicking in the profile view in your fediverse app like you normally would. Individual posts also have landing pages so you can link people to them if you want (or you land there by clicking into its permalink from your client). Updating the styling to be a little more reddit-like, complete with fake upvote numbers that change on every reload.  @darius I wrote something about #Botiquette and posted to Lemmy and #SocialHub about it. If you have any thoughts on them, they would be most welcome :) Oh hey, I found my notes I took on this project originally in like... I want to say it was summer 2019 at the DWEB conference at the Internet Archive in San Francisco. I cheekily title the project "The Great American Novel" because that is the working title for all my projects that seem too big. Forgive my handwriting and my brainstorming of ideas for naming the project. Which I guess still isn't named.  @touk you should be able to simply fork the project on glitch, though it is in very active development at the moment, probably best to hold off :)  @darius The philosophy of "make tiny tool that is trivial to maintain and you understand completely rather than use off-the-shelf behemoth" is always a satisfying philosophy to apply. I generate my not particularly impressive site with https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite, a tiny python script to generate static sites where the explicit goal is to be so small you can easily understand it and just start modifying it to do what you want, rather than a big system you struggle to understand completely.  @darius Good luck with hosting your own Masto instance for your bots. Also, is the story in the link for reals or is that also a mock-up? @trishalynn It's for real! And it's not my own Mastodon instance, it's about 100 lines of code that I wrote myself that can talk to Mastodon etc. @darius Oh, well in that case, congrats on getting your code to work! I know how difficult that can be. |
Gregory's Server
There is some weirdness because the software doesn't do things like... render a profile page, yet. So clicking through to the "home" profile takes you to https://tinysubversions.glitch.me/u/bottwosentencehorror which is just a bunch of JSON output right now. I'll eventually make it look a little nicer, something like my rss converter feed pages: https://rss.friend.camp/u/r_falcom/
Basically, I wanted a way to deploy bots on my own software that uses ~100 lines of code rather than being a huge piece of infrastructure like a Masto server.
There is some weirdness because the software doesn't do things like... render a profile page, yet. So clicking through to the "home" profile takes you to https://tinysubversions.glitch.me/u/bottwosentencehorror which is just a bunch of JSON output right now. I'll eventually make it look a little nicer, something like my rss converter feed pages: https://rss.friend.camp/u/r_falcom/