What is this?

This allows you to run a bot in the fediverse that can reply to posts, make scheduled posts, etc, and whatever you want to add. I wanted something that used mispy's twitter_ebooks Markov algorithm, as I liked the results, so I built something around it.

How to use

You need to create an app, and generate a bearer token for your bot, we have a script for that. You can set those values manually in config.yml or you can use the script in the next step to do so interactively.

INSTANCE_URL
BOT_USERNAME

Generating your bearer token

Included in the util directory of this repository is auth_helper.rb, you can use it to generate a bearer token for your bot and have the option to add it config.yml, if you wish. Just run auth_helper.rb and follow the interactive prompts.

Next you will need a corpus file or files, which will be the source of the bot's posts.

Corpus file(s)

The bot will need something to generate the posts from, this will usually be your own posts if it's your personal bot, this will be compiled into the model file.

The model code will currently accept everything twitter_ebooks did: Twitter archive JSON/CSV files and plain text files, I added support for Mastodon/Pleroma JSON files, so they can be loaded without manual conversion.

Getting the corpus for Mastodon/Pleroma

For Mastodon/Pleroma there's a tool called mastodon-archive for Python, it can be installed with pip.

After installed you can archive your posts with the following command (warning: this will pull Direct Message posts too, use my fork below if you want to avoid that)

mastodon-archive archive --no-favourites username@instance.url

Just follow the steps to authenticate, at the end, it will create a JSON file in the current directory, you can also run this command again to update that file. This JSON file can be used as your corpus file to generate the model file.

I have a modified version of mastodon-archive that can pull the archive from uses other than the authed user (you can auth from any instance, but you only get the posts that federated to that instance), figure out how to install it though lole (python setup.py install maybe idk)

mastodon-archive archive --no-favourites --id target-username@instance.url your-username@instance.url

Edit config.yml again and modify CORPUS_FILES to add the path to your corpus file, this value is a list and can have multiple corpus files (if you wish), like

CORPUS_FILES:
- corpus.json
- corpus.txt
- twitter_corpus.json

Installing Ruby dependencies

Make sure you have Ruby and the Bundler gem (gem install bundler) installed.

cd into the project's directory and run bundle install

Running the bot

Just cd into the project's directory and run

bundle exec ruby fedi_ebooks.rb

This is fine in some cases, but I recommend creating a service for the bot so it can be restarted automatically and run on boot. Also, it is recommended to run the bot once to generate the .model file and then restart, to decrease memory usage that is experienced when generating it. Depending on the size of the corpus file, you may want to have a swap file on your server or generate the .model on your desktop/laptop before uploading it to the server, as it may use a lot of memory for this process, but you only need to do this once and whenever you update the archive.

Creating a service (systemd and OpenRC)

I've included an example service file for systemd called example.service and one for OpenRC called example.openrc in the util directory, but you’ll have to edit some of this stuff to match your system.

First install GNU Screen:

sudo apt install screen (Debian/Ubuntu)

sudo pacman -S screen (Arch)

systemd

Create the service file (you may not have nano installed by default, eg: Arch, install it)

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/fediebooks.service

Paste the contents of the example file here.

Where it says User=, edit with your Linux username.

Edit everywhere that says /path/to/your/bot/files to the folder where your bot files are.

Edit /home/user/.gem/ruby/3.0.0/bin/bundler to what the command which bundler gives you

Edit /usr/bin/ruby to what the command which ruby gives you (should match most systems already)

Save the file (CTRL+S).

Run

sudo systemctl enable fediebooks
sudo systemctl start fediebooks

Now the service should be running and start automatically on boot.

OpenRC