Plerobuddies

Yay! Working examples say more than a 1000 words:

• @acvilagers@chat.brainbaking.com
• @gblegacy@chat.brainbaking.com

Mastodon/Pleroma Buddies (bots)

Execute through yarn toot or yarn node src/chat.js. It cycles through all configured "buddies" and toots a message accordingly. Use your favorite crontab timestamp to fire off toots automatically.

If you'd like to let a specific buddy chat - for instance to configure them individually in your crontab - use the argument buddy:

yarn toot --buddy [by-cool-buddy]

The name should match the buddy property in the config file (not the name property: that's the buddy directory name).

Packaged buddies

1. animalcrossing: collect data from https://animalcrossing.fandom.com/wiki/ and randomly toot about a villager, including a link to the Fandom page and the birthday. Uses dirty scraping, no rate limit hit yet...
2. mobygames: collect data through the Moby Games API so you'll need an API key: https://www.mobygames.com/info/api - the API is rate-limited at one call per second and 360 per hour. The above working example posts a random Game Boy game with two screenshots collected via the API. It's generic, so just configure platform in the config file (10 is GB).

Creating a new buddy

Create a directory in src/buddies/ and add it to config.js using the same name. Each buddy should have a buddy.js with one exposed method called chat, which gets executed with a config parameter. Look at the examples for more information. End the file with something like module.exports = { chat }.

The function chat should create a "toot", with the following structure:

{
    "toot": "hi there buddy!",
    "attach": [ "file1.jpg", "file2.jpg" ],
    "attachDescription": `Screenshots of game x`
}

An attach and its description are optional. Newlines using \n in a toot are allowed.

Configuring the buddies

See config.sample.js. A config file should expose buddies as an array with the following structure:

{
    name: "buddyname", // same as the dir name
    buddy: "my cool buddy", // unique buddy id
    instance: "https://mastodon.social", // where to post to
    oauthToken: "my-token" // the oauth token for that server/user to post the status  with
}

Optional config flags can be used in the chat function if desired.

There's a sanity check implemented: at minimum, each config should have name, buddy, instance, and oauthToken present.

How to get an OAuth token from a Masto/Pleroma instance?

I've prepared a few utility functions in registerApp.js for you. First, call await register(), which prints an URL to go to. Next, fill in the client id, secret, and returned token, after granting the app access to read and write. Then, call await fetchToken(). Paste that token in the config file. Done!

Token refreshing is not (yet) implemented. Most tokens are valid for a year or so. Who knows what'll happen by then.