I lately revealed a submit on Mastodon that was shared by six different accounts inside two minutes. Curious, I visited the profiles and found that not less than one in all them was a tech bot — accounts that mechanically share posts primarily based on tags similar to #datascience or #opensource.
Mastodon is presently rising quickly as a decentralized various to X (previously Twitter). How can bots on a platform like this make our on a regular basis lives simpler? And what are the dangers? Do bots enrich or disrupt social networks? How do I’ve to make use of the Mastodon API to create a bot myself?
On this article, I cannot solely present you the way bots work usually but additionally offer you a step-by-step information with code examples and screenshots on create a Mastodon bot with Python and use the API.
Desk of Content material
1 — Why do Mastodon and tech bots exist?
2 — Technical basics for a bot on a social network
3 — Bots: The balancing act between benefit and risk
4 — How to create a Mastodon bot: Step-by-step instructions with Python
Final Thoughts
Mastodon is a decentralized social community developed by Eugen Rochko in Germany in 2016. The platform is open-source and is predicated on a community of servers that collectively kind the so-called ‘Fediverse’. If you wish to share posts, you choose a server similar to mastodon.social or…
