Over the years I’ve written quite a few Twitter bots. But since Elon Musk took over – the bird site has become unbearable, so I, like many others, migrated to Mastodon. What Mastodon is, and how it operates is a whole another story, but for our intents and purposes it is similar to Twitter: there is a home timeline where posts from people you follow appear, and you can post to the timeline as well.

Back on Twitter I used to have a bot that would tweet one-liners from Pink Floyd lyrics every hour. Follow me along as I recreate it on Mastodon.

First and foremost you have to make sure the Mastodon instance you’re on allows bots. Some do, some don’t – read the server rules to find out. I am using botsin.space instance that is specifically meant to host bots. Continue reading →