I love building bots (and bot craftmanship)
A few months ago, I received notice that the botsin.space Mastodon instance was going to shut down by December this year, after more than 7 years of service. I hope bot-makers are able to migrate their bots to other instances and keep them running, to keep the online bot craftmanship alive.
While I only found my way into the fediverse a couple years back, I've loved making online bots (e.g. on Telegram, formerly on X (formerly Twitter)) and also stumbling upon these small creations made by other people ever since I started college more than ten years ago.
These toy bots are by no means a technological feat: most of the ones I refer to just post short pieces of text to social media, or respond to triggers on instant messaging apps. But no matter how advanced they are, I find it wonderful to connect to a bot creator and understand the creative intent behind the bot.
I remember a few bots that inspired me to start creating my own: among others, there was a bot on Twitter that posted imaginary news headlines for a fictional RPG setting, and another one that posted ASCII-art of small boats sailing through the nights. There's also a lot of bots that post excerpts of poets and short stories, and the more useful variety (weather, real headlines, earthquake warnings, etc).
Due to the botsin.space closure, I had to migrate one of my bots (@caracasadjetivo) to another instance. Originally on Twitter, I decided to move it to a self-hosted, barebones instance at caracasadj.aitorres.com, made possible by ActivityBot. While I've had a few other bots in the past (a weather bot, a few poetry-related bots...), this is the only one I currently keep active. That might change in the (near) future, as I go back to my old files and re-deploy other bots in the fediverse.
I don't really have a bottom line or conclusion here, other than inviting you to explore small-sized social interactions on Mastodon or other similar places through the creation of bots. You don't need AI, or LLMs, or any fancy technology for that. Just a few lines of code, an idea and a spark to bring it to life.
Happy botting :-)
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