17 hours ago
I recently published a post on Mastodon that was shared by six other accounts within two minutes. Curious, I visited the profiles and discovered that at least one of them was a tech bot — accounts that automatically share posts based on tags such as #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 everyday lives easier? And what are the risks? Do bots enrich or disrupt social networks? How do I have to use the Mastodon API to create a bot myself?
In this article, I will not only show you how bots work in general but also give you a step-by-step guide with code examples and screenshots on how 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 benefit and risk
4 — How to 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 is based on a network of servers that together form the so-called ‘Fediverse’. If you want to share posts, you select a server such as mastodon.social or…