The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Since Elon is trying to burn some USD 44 billion as rapidly as possible, many on-line communities that grew big on Twitter are now trying to re-establish themselves on other social network services.

One of them is Mastodon, the Fediverse based federated or distributed social network.

Like Twitter (or maybe “unlike Twitter”, because of the tremendous API charges for Twitter bots) Mastodon bots can be of tremendous help on spreading awareness of a community.

One example is [Wayback/Archive] bitbonk/DotNetSocialBot: A Mastodon bot that can boost a community running at [Wayback/Archive] .NET Bot :dotnet: (@bot@dotnet.social) which helps boosting the .NET community on Mastodon (quite a few harrdore .NET developers have an account on [Wayback/Archive] dotnet.social, but you can follow the bot from any Mastodon server: the virtue of a distributed social network).

It is written in quite a generic way, and founded on a solid framework, which means it is easy to extend to other communities. Heck, it might be even be easy to generalise it into a highly configurable universal community bot!

Probably the boost permutations could be made generated, but the hardcoded list at [Wayback/Archive] DotNetSocialBot/DotNetSocialBot.FunctionApp/Config.cs at d889186a212a02ca7b41d0ee955bf077323897f9 · bitbonk/DotNetSocialBot is a good start.

The foundation is [Wayback/Archive] glacasa/Mastonet: C# Library for Mastodon by [Wayback/Archive] Guillaume Lacasa :dotnet: (@glacasa@dotnet.social) which has documentation at [Wayback/Archive] Mastonet/DOC.md at main · glacasa/Mastonet · GitHub.

I think the bot is running as an Azure function, so here is a reminder to myself to figure that out myself (or ask the developer <g>).

The core code is very simple as you can see on [Wayback/Archive] DotNetSocialBot/DotNetSocialBot.FunctionApp/RepostOnMastodon.cs at main · bitbonk/DotNetSocialBot · GitHub.

That’s also why it should be relatively easy to adapt it to other communities.

Via

This blog post started because of [Wayback/Archive] bitbonk: “The code for @bot is now open …” – Mastodon

The code for @bot is now open source on github.com/bitbonk/DotNetSocialBot, written in #CSharp and #dotnet using @glacasa’s Mastonet
The bot boosts (original) posts where it either was @ mentioned or that contain common .NET hashtags like #dotnet or #csharp.
You can also ask the bot to boost any original post by replying to the post and asking the bot to boost the above post, like so
@bot Boost this, please! (or similar)

–jeroen