I recently published a post on Mastodon that was shared by six other accounts inside two minutes. Curious, I visited the profiles and discovered that no less than certainly one of them was a tech bot — accounts that routinely share posts based on tags akin to #datascience or #opensource.
Mastodon is currently growing rapidly as a decentralized alternative to X (formerly Twitter). How can bots on a platform like this make our on a regular basis lives easier? And what are the risks? Do bots enrich or disrupt social networks? How do I actually have to make use of the Mastodon API to create a bot myself?
In this text, I is not going to only show you ways bots work typically but in addition provide you with a step-by-step guide with code examples and screenshots on easy methods to create a Mastodon bot with Python and use the API.
Table of Content
1 — Why do Mastodon and tech bots exist?
2 — Technical basics for a bot on a social network
3 — Bots: The balancing act between profit and risk
4 — How you can create a Mastodon bot: Step-by-step instructions with Python
Final Thoughts
Mastodon is a decentralized social network developed by Eugen Rochko in Germany in 2016. The platform is open-source and relies on a network of servers that together form the so-called ‘Fediverse’. If you ought to share posts, you choose a server akin to mastodon.social or…
