It is getting to be time for my annual post about the Thanksgiving Challenge. Previous editions of this post can be found here, here, and here. Basically, the challenge is to spend the entire Thanksgiving long weekend coding by yourself. I’ve already covered the questionable productivity benefits (and very real mental health downsides) of doing this. But by now it’s tradition, so we’ll just plow ahead as though there weren’t any other options.

For me, this year’s challenge is going to be about bots. The venerable Mastodon instance botsin.space is shutting down, and (some of) the fediverse is in mourning. New homes need to be found for countless bots, or they will soon disappear. I have five bots on botsin.space, and I’d like to re-home three of them. The other two are, imo, not worth saving, and I’ll let them die a quiet, noble death.

Anyhow, I’ll move the good ones to the instance that I run, mastodon.ocert.at. This will provide a reliable home for the bots, although maybe with some reduced visibility, since my instance is lightly federated. Mastodon has decent account migration functionality, so hopefully that will mean that some of the people who enjoy these bots can continue to do so. From a code perspective, I can still do the compute on PythonAnywhere, and I expect that the only part of that setup that I will have to redo is the authentication.

Anyhow, have a good Thanksgiving and happy botting!