With the sad news of the #BotsInSpace server closing, what do you all plan to do with your bots?

botwiki.org

Jef Poskanzer :batman:

@botwiki I guess I don't really understand what botsinspace does. I have a few things that post to fedi automatically, which most people would consider bots. They use a simple shell script that calls a CLI HTTP client. Why is more than that needed?

botwiki.org

@jef It's a beloved institution!

Stefan Bohacek (@[email protected])

Here's an article I wrote in 2018, exploring this amazing creative space: https://botwiki.org/blog/what-kind-of-bots-are-posting-in-the-fediverse/ And here's my short interview with @[email protected] from around the same time: https://botwiki.org/blog/catching-up-with-the-creator-of-botsin-space/ @[email protected], you have contributed immensely to making the fediverse a wonderful place, and I want to thank you for that! #BotsInSpace #bots #CreativeBots

Stefan's Personal Mastodon Server (stefanbohacek.online)

Jef Poskanzer :batman:

@botwiki Yeah but why does it take terabytes and maxiflops?

Tom Casavant

@jef @botwiki botsinspace hosts thousands of active bot accounts, each of which are generating traffic and data (32 million statuses to be exact), it's just the cost of running a mastodon instance

RIP botsin.space

(muffinlabs.com)

Jef Poskanzer :batman:

@tom @botwiki Yes I saw that.

What's the advantage of having all bots on one instance, as opposed to making some fairly trivial tools available to bot authors and having them post to their own instances? What's the added value of centralization?

Stefan Bohacek

@jef @tom @botwiki

"making some fairly trivial tools available"

I might have to ask you to elaborate on that.

Not everyone who makes creative bots has devops skills to run and maintain their own server.

Or the time.

Colin has been a great admin, the sign-up process has been smooth, you could always reach out for help.

And if you have a few dozen accounts to manage, like I do, it makes sense to keep them in one place.

Jef Poskanzer :batman:

@stefan @tom @botwiki By "post to their own instances" I didn't mean *run* their own instances. I sure don't!

Tom Casavant

@jef @stefan @botwiki if you're hosting the bots on mastodon.social that's just more centralized than botsinspace haha

But the reason is a lot of instances don't want to support a bunch of bot accounts, they're having enough funding issues as is hosting regular accounts, so botsinspace was an easy place to put a bot without having to find instances that don't mind you creating 10 different bot accounts.

I'd love to see some simple server you could deploy to glitch.com (or similar) that just has the ActivityPub or Mastodon API implemented and you could run your own with a click of a button.

Stefan Bohacek

@jef @tom @botwiki Ah, got it. Well I guess it's a preference with tradeoffs then.

I have about 50 accounts*, and having to spread them across that many servers, or even just a dozen or two, feels like a lot of extra work.

But there would certainly be advantages!

* https://stefans-creative-bots.glitch.me

Jef Poskanzer :batman:

@tom @stefan @botwiki snac2 may be close to what you seek. If I wanted to run my own AP instance I'd try that first. https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2 (looks like it's down at the moment though)

Stefan Bohacek

@tom @jef @botwiki

"I'd love to see some simple server you could deploy to glitch.com"

I did play with this idea a while ago, but with the disk space limitations of Glitch, you'd need to set up external storage (my project supported both S3 and Neocities via their API), so it was a bit too involved.

I know @darius worked on something similar at one point, not sure if he ever made that project public.

Stefan Bohacek

@jef @tom @botwiki Yep, I was looking at this yesterday, and also GoToSocial. Both look very promising!