Mastodon.py proved to be a very easy way to make a bot in Python that can talk to the federated net, specifically the Mastodon API. With a little push from Terence Eden’s blog (below), I was able to get started quickly.
What are we trying to do here? It’s a loaded question. Basically, I use a different-than-Mastodon federated net software called Akkoma for my microblogging needs (find me here: @knova-dartboard-social). For some reason, I cannot subscribe to my WordPress blog feed from Akkoma, but it works fine via a test Mastodon account. What gives? I am still trying to figure that out, but I’m narrowing down on it being a bug in how Akkoma handles follows. Full disclosure – I could be way off, and it might be an issue with the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress – there is more investigation to be done.
Anyway, I figured if I can see it on a Mastodon account, I should be able to then view the reposts on that Mastodon account and see the original post, right? Bingo:
The code for this is available in my Github page, and it also includes a Dockerbuild file so you can turn this into a docker image and then container. I’m still learning a bunch about this, but my next step is to publish it on DockerHub or some other container repository and make it more easily configurable from a command line argument.
PS: Docker might not be the easiest way to run a simple Python script, but I wanted to learn more about building a container, which I had never done before. I am also going to look into adapting this into an AWS Lambda function or something similar for ease of use.
What about the bug in Akkoma? The next item on my to do list is to officially report it, but I need to gather more information first. I hope this can be identified and resolved so we can work towards building a better federated internet, without having to rely on one open source project (Mastodon). The more projects that interoperate, the better.
Leave a Reply