The "No One Cares" Show, Ep. 13: On Gab and Lolicon, or Why you should #GetOffGab
https://peertube.anon-kenkai.com/w/bND3Loo8X6daX23V7ZHPRn
LOLSpam Returns as a Super-Simple Mastodon Bot
Back when I was comparing social media archives, I considered resurrecting my old LOLspam project as a Mastodon bot. I never quite got around to it, partly because I was able to do most of what I wanted to automate using IFTTT, so I stopped investigating that last 5%.
Last night, I threw together a quick and dirty bot to post a random item from a text file in about 20 minutes.
Then I spent three hours going through the Twitter archive for @LOL_Spam, pulling out jokes that are too dated or cringeworthy. (I hope I didn’t miss any. It was midnight by the time I finished, and I was really tired!)
This morning I modified the script to take a second file as a queue for new items.
If you’re interested in funny/odd spam subjects (and you’re OK with swearing and occasional lewdness), check out @LOLspam@BotsIn.Space. You can follow from any Mastodon or other Fediverse account. Update: it’s moved to @lolspam@snac24.keysmash.xyz since BotsIn.Space shut down.
The script itself is called fedbotrandom. I wrote it in Perl, using text files, so I could just put it in cron on any *nix box instead of worrying about language/database support or installing a runtime or DB engine. I’ve made it really simple on purpose, and while I do plan on writing some better error handling when I have time, it’s already more complex than I wanted it to be!
#fedbotrandom #fediverse #lolSpam #mastodon #programming #socialNetworking