this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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Fediverse

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Has anyone thought about a Fediverse bot platform/app? (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

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, @[email protected], @[email protected], and @[email protected].

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

As is, its already very easy to make bots for the Fediverse, and there is pretty good support for it. The limit is just a lack of interested users, and a general dislike of bots here - esspecially novelty ones.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Out of curiosity, why DO people dislike bots here?

Not that I am such a major Bot user, but I feel like they could defeated be helpful, as well as add some variety.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

For me it depends on what the bot is actually doing. I don't have any problem with a bot that helps with moderation, provides an unpaywalled article, or others that help the user.

What I do dislike are all the bots that are just making posts from an RSS feed. If it's a dedicated community for that purpose that's fine, but that's often not the case.

edit: I think a simple way to sum up my feelings is that I don't want bots posting content, I want people to do that. Bots can help parse that content, or even provide context, but I don't come here to interact with them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Honestly, I don't completely get it myself. While yes, a lot of bots are unhelpful clutter like remindme bot, or low quality garbage like most LLM bots, there are many that are genuinely really useful or moderate enough to be funny and unobtrusive. I guess its probably just a mix of annoyance at their frequent overuse, and the pretentious attitude Lemmy often has.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

This bot seems to be an example of what you are describing: https://lemmy.world/post/27664878

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

@Teknevra this seems like a good place to mention @hongminhee's @botkit

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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 @[email protected] 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Either of those are only options for someone who runs an instance.

I agree running things the other way around would be better, but monitoring about a dozen communities, I get away with a call every 5 minutes, and it almost never needs to load a second page. That is not significant afaik.

How would it miss stuff? You'd always use "new" sort and load pages until you run into content from the last update. Stuff from the last page appearing again because new content moved the content along, shouldn't stop you from loading another page, and any new content will be caught in the next update.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Miss stuff as in there might be changes to the post or comments users make within that interval, which the bot will never know of. I need the bot to be notified of any new content the moment it is federated to the bot's instance.

And polling for new content will increase the amount of API requests per time unit as the bot gets added to new communities. I'd rather have it be somewhat future-proof, because if Lemmy ever gets more popular than it is right now, there might be a new post made to a community every few minutes. It will especially become a big problem for new comments, as they are created more frequently than posts.