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Bike Nite (on the Fediverse!)

There’s a bike community on Mastodon (and/or parts of the Fediverse that connect with Mastodon) and you can be a part of it.

It happens every Friday 4pm Pacific time. I often forget about it when it happens but read the posts later, and sometimes even reply. It’s a synchronous and asynchronous conversation, and it works fine that way.

Here’s an example of the post you’ll see each Friday:

Our community discussion #BikeNite starts in about an hour, at 4pm Pacific. I post cycle-y questions w/ Q1, Q2, Q3; if you answer w/ A1, A2, A3, etc, it’s easier to match.

Tag #BikeNite if you want your answer to be more discoverable; follow it to see questions & replies in your feed. Boost & reply to replies to keep the discussion going.

(You can follow BikeNiteQ tag so questions are easier to find, but you don’t need to include this in your answers)

And yeah, #BikeTooter is totally a hashtag I follow and use myself.

There are a ton of bike people on Mastodon and all the ones I’ve interacted with so far have been awesome and helpful. Hey there’s even a bot that posts pictures of all the beautiful people who ride bikes in Madison called @cyclists_of_msn (We need one for Milwaukee!)

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POTUS on the Fediverse

As I write this Joe Biden is the 46th President of the United States. There is a Presidential account called POTUS over on Twitter (X) at twitter.com/POTUS which honestly should probably be deleted since Twitter (X) is run by a fascist-friendly entity in 2024. (Note: I stopped posting on Twitter in 2022.)

There is also a @potus account on Threads, which is a platform owned by another terrible entity, Facebook.

Both of those accounts exist so the President can talk to the people, which is good. Sure, the President has many ways to talk to the people, but those platforms provide a place where the people can talk back, and share, and discuss. Those are (sometimes) good things.

But this is the Internet my friends, and just like the President, any company, any organization, and any person, can have a web site, the President can have their own damn server for social media microblogging.

Do you know about the Fediverse? Imagine if you could choose an alternative to Twitter, but still talk to Twitter users… or talk to Facebook users, and Instagram users, and Threads users, and now imagine we don’t need Twitter or Facebook (which also owns Instagram and Threads). It’s possible.

Also imagine you can block users and also entire servers. If there’s a Nazi server you can block it so you’ll never see their posts. And yes, there are such servers. Most of them are already blocked by most civilized Fediverse servers.

Threads is starting to federate, and what that means is I can see all of the posts that @potus@threads.net posts even if I never have a Threads account, because I have a Mastodon account at @rasterweb@mastodon.social on the Fediverse. I can subscribe and see the posts at https://mastodon.social/@potus@threads.net. Now, at this point I cannot reply to those posts, but supposedly by the end of 2024 this will be possible. (Threads needs to turn on two-way Federation, basically.)

Now, there are two opposing views of the Fediverse allowing federation to and from Threads, and those boil down to “Hey, Threads is run by a terrible organization that will not behave and does terrible things so we’ll block them!” and “Hey, this is the way we get more users to leave Facebook/Threads, by showing them there is an open alternative!”

I’ve probably simplified the two views, but I’m a simple man. I will admit I still use Instagram (mainly because I have a lot of friends there) but I also use Pixelfed and believe me, if I could just use Pixelfed and still interact with Instagram users, and they could see my posts and interact with me, I’d probably stop using Instagram…

Of course if Facebook hears enough of this, they’ll probably never want to Federate. It would mean losing users. Large companies depend on lock-in to keep you there, and it sucks.

So while I mentioned my account at mastodon.social, that’s not all there is… In fact, there are hundreds, sorry, thousands of Mastodon servers. Here’s a list of some. Check out FediDB and right now there are over 27,000 servers on the Fediverse. Some have thousands of users, some have just one user.

But I just wanted to let you know there is an alternative. Best case, we destroy these large powerful corporations that control social media, and worse case we live alongside them, as an alternative for some people.

Wait, who pays for this!? Well, people do. I donate a small amount of money to the servers I have accounts on. Not everyone does, and that’s okay. I don’t see advertisements, and none of the people who run the servers I use are selling my data. The Fediverse is much more about the people, not the money. But will it scale? Sure, maybe, or not? We don’t know, but we sure as hell should try it and find out.

Anyway, welcome Mr. President!

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DotBot (Another Mastodon Bot)

Well, it’s been two weeks since I wrote about the @WeShouldBuild bot on Mastodon and somehow I created another bot. This one is called @DotBot and it creates a new piece of dot-based art once per day. (You can see an example above.)

I once again used Mastodon.py for this (GitHub and Docs) and there are twice as many lines of code for this one, which is still less than 50 lines. This one generates an image, saves it to disk, then posts that along with a small amount of text. A cron job kicks things off at 8:30am CST every day.

As for these dots? I realized it’s something I’ve been toying with for over a decade!

The image above was generated with a Processing sketch in April 2011. At that point I had probably been using Processing for less than a year. I had a lot of fun exploring creating images with code.

Here’s some fun I had with the images being projected onto a large while wall and taking photos of myself in front of it.

I found a folder dated September 2017 that had a bunch of generated images which I think I may have compiled into a video with each image being a frame. (I’ve done this other times, I just can’t find an output file for these. I probably did them last minute for the Maker Faire Milwaukee Dark Room and never got a chance to document them!)

I did find these images in the folder though… Not sure what I was doing, but I like it. If I had to dig up some related things I’d pick annular (more info) from 2013 and maybe Shape Grid Circles from 2019. I realized there are a few other related things but maybe they warrant their own post. Especially if I can find the videos. (If not, I can recreate them.)

Okay, that went a bit off course (of course) but the important thing is, if you’re on the Fediverse and want to see new dot-based colorful art each day, just follow @dotbot@botsin.space

And if you’re not on the Fediverse you can still get the RSS feed! Just grab https://botsin.space/@dotbot.rss

Note: The botsin.space server will shut down in December 2024.

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We Should Build (A Mastodon Bot)

I joined Mastodon at the end of October 2022 (I’m @rasterweb@mastodon.social) and it’s been amazing. I can’t tell you how much I love a platform with no ads, no tracking, and no far-right extremists. So after (exactly) two months I’m pleased to be releasing my first Mastodon bot. If you’re interested, give a follow to @weshouldbuild@toot.works

I’ve described it as “A helpful bot that will give you suggestions for things to build…” and it’s just simple and silly and it was an easy way for me to get started with bots on Mastodon. It comes from the work I did on the MMPIS at Milwaukee Makerspace.

I used Mastodon.py for this (GitHub and Docs) and even though I set out to dig deeper into Python back in 2020, things got derailed (ha, as did the world) so my Python skills are still lacking, but this is seriously less than 20 lines of code and I had a fun time writing it.

Besides my main Mastodon account I have another account that is really just a backup account (for testing and… because backup) and two accounts on servers run by two friends on their own servers. I chose to put this on botsin.space because it’s specifically for Mastodon bots. (I also sent the admin a donation to help cover the server costs.)

Note: As of 2024-12-14 botsin.space has shut down. We moved the bot to https://toot.works/@weshouldbuild thanks to Joe who runs toot.works.

I’m excited about creating another bot already, and I have an idea what I want to do. I think this will be a good way for me to flex my coding muscles since I’ve been writing the same sort of things for the past two years and more Python experience could certainly come in handy.

Note: The botsin.space server will shut down in December 2024.