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Fediverse @lemmy.ml
Teknevra (She/Her) @lemmy.world

Has anyone thought about a Fediverse bot platform/app?

Is it just me, or has anyone else thought about the potential for a dedicated bot platform for the Fediverse?

Think of something similar to how Discord has two completely separate apps for managing Discord bots: Bots for Discord, and Bot Designer for Discord.

Users can find, customize, and run bots in Discord servers, all in one place.

Now imagine that, but tailored for the Fediverse.

What I’m envisioning is a platform/app where mods, admins, or individuals can create, browse, and easily deploy bots across different Fediverse platforms.

For example:

  • A Lemmy community could add an Automod bot to enforce rules, a "Fact of the Day" bot to post fun trivia, or even character bots (e.g., Harry Potter/Albus Dumbledore/Voldemort/etc. bots for a Harry Potter community, or Link/Zelda for a gaming-themed community, etc.).
  • A Pixelfed bot could automatically feature stunning images or run photo contests.
  • A Mastodon bot could post breaking news updates or even serve as a Q&A bot for a popular hashtag.
  • Peertube bots could promote trending videos or notify communities of shared uploads.
  • A Bookwyrm bot could suggest popular books or create fun reading challenges.
  • A bot for Calendar-based events, like reminding communities about upcoming holidays or events based on their interests.
  • A bot for gamified engagement, such as awarding badges for engagement or posting interactive polls.
  • A bot for memes and humour, generating community-specific memes using AI.
  • A translation bot to help users bridge discussions across different languages in a multilingual community.
  • A bot for feeds, pulling external data (e.g., weather, stock updates, or sports scores) into relevant communities.
  • A welcome bot to greet new users and help them onboard into the community.
  • etc.

It could work by letting mods/admins/users select which Fediverse platform they want to use the bot on (e.g., Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube, etc.), choose their bot type, and tweak settings for functionality—all from one hub.

The potential for creative and engaging bots is huge, and it could genuinely enhance many Fediverse communities.

I’d honestly love to work on something like this, but unfortunately, I don’t have the time, energy, or knowledge to make it a reality.

So I wanted to toss the idea out here to see if anyone else has thought about something similar—or if this concept already exists and I’ve completely missed it.

What do you think?

Could something like this benefit the Fediverse and its various platforms?

13 comments

  • Hm.

    Making and running fediverse bots is very easy right now. The APIs are well documented and libraries exist for almost every platform and programming language to make things even simpler. All the parts you'd need for every bot anyway, are done and available. You only need to write the code that does what your specific use-case requires.

    I've made four now. Lemmytrix, @dailycomic@sh.itjust.works, @saucechan@ani.social, and @mofumatic@sakurajima.moe.

    At the same time, it should have some barrier for entry.

    If you need a piece of software to hold your hand every step of the way, you maybe shouldn't be responsible for a bot.

    And it's not really something you can easily make general purpose software for. There is the RED bot for discord, but it is a huge project and still relies on user-created add-ons to do more specific things.

  • A botkit is in development, using Fedify for the federation bits.

    I know of two projects that could have a “bot store” in a way. The first is IceShrimp.NET which is working on a plugin architecture .

    The second is from Mastodon, a plugin architecture is being created, initially to support quote posts, I think? Not much info there yet.

    These things collectively could be used as building blocks for your idea.

  • I don't know about such a platform, but I'm making an automod for Lemmy that works by users writing their own plugins. So the users are pretty much responsible for making the bot work the way they want it to. That means you actually can pretty much make any bot that can only interact within the community you mod. I just haven't been able to progress much as I've been stuck thinking about how it would receive certain events such as new comments, new posts, etc.

    • Only way I know to do this, is to just regularly check the comment and post feeds, loading more pages until you get content you've already ingested.

      This is how @saucechan@ani.social works. It also responds to mentions using notifications, but mentions in post bodies don't create notifications, so the work-around was necessary.

      If you didn't know, there is a comment feed endpoint, which will contain new comments from all posts, without requiring you to check every post for new comments. It's not used by most clients, but it's available in the default webUI, and hence the API.

      You can make it a little simpler, by only loading the subscribed feed, and making sure you sub to the relevant communities on the bot account.

      • That is not an option as it has the chance to miss stuff and it's also too many API requests. Mentions would be the solution if the bot simply responded to commands, which is not the case.

        That is why I considered either LemmyWebhooks or just directly querying the database. The best choice here seems to be querying the database.

13 comments