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I've been thinking about the demise of botsin.space. Running a site for bots is hard (and expensive) but writing and running an ActivityPub-based bot should be easy.

To prove this was the case I added experimental support for bots/automations to Ktistec in the form of scripts that the server periodically runs. These scripts can be in a programming language of your choice. The server provides credentials for its API in the process environment (if you can use curl you can publish posts), simple interaction happens via stdin/stdout/stderr, and the complexity of using ActivityPub is abstracted away.

The code is only available on the following branch for the moment:

https://github.com/toddsundsted/ktistec/commits/run-scripts/

There are a couple example shell scripts here:

https://github.com/toddsundsted/ktistec/commit/4982925a...

I have a few enhancements in mind, but it's already proven useful as a means to periodically log data from my server host, and I'll use it, when finished, to publish release notes.

#ktistec #activitypub #fediverse #bots


Have you ever noticed an account on here labelled "Automated" or "Bot"?

It means the account is a bot, operating automatically without a human doing the posting.

This might sound odd, but there are many useful and entertaining #bots, for example posting sports results or weather bulletins or public domain art. Other bots run interactive games of chess or D&D campaigns or text adventures.

Find out more at:

➡️ https://fedi.tips/why-are-some-accounts-marked-bot-on-mastodon/

...and some good bots to follow:

➡️ https://fedi.directory/tag/bots/

#bots


Just gonna spend my whole day muting bots in the Federated Timeline. I love wasting my fucking time.
It should be mandatory that all bots post with a #bots so that it's easy to filter out
#bots


I and some others recently saw an interesting (clever but in a gross way) spam development, exploiting the privacy of favoriting.

It was an account set up as a bot using the Mastodon logo and name to appear official. Its profile was devoted entirely to text claiming your PC was infected and your account would be removed for slowing down Mastodon if you didn’t click a suspicious link to fix it. The account had no posts, follows, or followers.

It seemed to operate by favoriting potential victims’ posts without boosting, leaving no visible tracks of where it had been or what it was doing, while bringing eyes to its profile. I know I clicked over to its profile to see what the heck was up. I wasn’t the only one.

The scammers have arrived.

#bots #spam #scam #scammers #Mastodon #malware