I made a Mastodon bot this past weekend. It’s called Why, and it tries to answer the perennial question “Why?” with responses from public domain texts from Project Gutenberg.
I built this for Mastodon, rather for Twitter, for a couple of reasons:
- I was curious about the Mastodon API and the tools that are available to work with it.
- I was also a bit discouraged with Twitter. Twitter has implemented a bot approval process intended to exclude certain bots. While I understand that they want to improve the quality of users’ timelines, the new sign-up process has driven away some bot makers.
- Mastodon has instances that are specifically bot-friendly, like botsin.space.
- Perhaps most importantly for me, Mastodon is generally very welcoming. This openness makes it fun to build projects there.
Going forward, I’ll be building bots on Mastodon rather than Twitter.
