josbot v0.8

A Twitter / Mastodon / Bluesky bot that posts lines from a TXT file.

Requirements

Written for Python 3. Required libraries:

• Tweepy for Twitter API interaction.
• Mastodon.py for Mastodon API interaction.
• atproto for Bluesky API interaction.
• YAML for reading/writing the settings file.

You can get these using pip3: pip3 install tweepy pyaml Mastodon.py atproto (or pip3 install -r requirements.txt)

Setup & running

Run python3 josbot.py

• If no settings.yml is found, it will be created in the same directory as josbot.py. This file is used for auth details and program settings.
• After configuring settings.yml, run python3 josbot.py again to start the bot.

The following options are available

• TWITTER_ENABLED, MASTODON_ENABLED, BLUESKY_ENABLED: Enable / disable individual social networks. When they are all disabled, the bot runs in dry run mode, fake posting a line every 2 seconds.
• TWITTER_ACCESS_KEY, TWITTER_ACCESS_SECRET, TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY and TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET: Auth configuration for Twitter, using the Oauth 1.0a (User Context) method.
• MASTODON_TOKEN and MASTODON_BASE_URL: Auth configuration for Mastodon. MASTODON_BASE_URL is the instance that hosts the account you want to post to (for example: https://mastodon.social/).
• BLUESKY_USERNAME and BLUESKY_PASS: Bluesky username (only the default BS server is supported atm, so YOURNAMEHERE.bsky.social) and password (or passkey).
• TWITTER_FOLLOWBACK: Try to follow back all followers on Twitter (due to API changes this is finicky. Runs in a seperate thread.)
• MASTODON_FOLLOWBACK: Try to follow back all followers on Mastodon. Currently not implemented.
• loop: Start over when the end of the file is reached (default: true)
• loop_shuffle: Shuffle the lines in the lines.txt file when starting over (default: true). This is ignored when loop is set to false.
• line_index: The current line of lines.txt you're posting. This allows the bot to resume after a system reboot without starting all over again.

If the bot reaches the end of lines.txt, the file is shuffled and the process starts over.

Todo

• Single-post and exit mode
• Configurable wait time between lines
• Configurable settings file location

Currently deployed as @dejossen, @[email protected] and @dejossen.bsky.social.

Currently used to post lines from the absurdist play De Jossen by Tom Lanoye. That's where the name of this bot comes from. In March 2023, I rewrote this bot so it became more general and can be used for any .txt-based lines of content.

The full play got manually restructured to 426 lines of each 140 characters max, starting from the original text which was released publicly on 2014 on Tom Lanoye's website. Tried to keep consistency when splitting lines in multiple posts, so there's never a split mid-sentence.

From the original PDF:

De tekst van De Jossen. Val en revival der saamhorigheid mag vrij worden gedownload en verspreid. Opvoeringen, geheel of gedeeltelijk, mogen pas plaatsvinden na een voorafgaande schriftelijke afspraak met SABAM

I'm assuming running Josbot is not a rendition but a distribution of the source material, which is explicitly allowed.