Beep... boop... boot, booting the narrowbotr off Twitter

Back in November after the various developments with Twitter, I worked out how to get my Twitter bot to run on Mastodon. Since the Twitter takeover there have been various announcements from the new owner and official Twitter accounts about free access to the Twitter API being suspended, although these have usually come and gone without said suspension happening.

Yesterday, however, I received an email from Twitter informing me the narrowbotr’s API access had now been suspended – surprise, it hadn’t, the bot was still posting away. Twitter has also released details of its new API access. This includes a free tier, that provides write-only (i.e. posting) of up to 1,500 tweets per month.

While the narrowbotr would be fine with this as it tweets about 4 times a day, I’ve decided instead to stop the bot posting to Twitter, and it now only posts to its Mastodon account. It’s got nearly as many followers on Mastodon as it has on Twitter, and its not like either of those counts is at all influential¹. The Twitter debacle has seen my personal engagement with Twitter wane, though I’ve gone in fits and starts with using Mastodon². I suspect mainly influenced by personal goings on than wider machinations in social media³. However, I can’t really be bothered tailoring the bot to the latest whims of an egotistical billionaire, so I’m proactively stopping it posting to Twitter.

Hashtags

I need to write a proper post about refactoring of the bot as some general refactoring happened around the same time as the migration to Mastodon. But in moving solely to Mastodon I’ve implemented a further couple of changes to add hashtags to the post.

There are some standard hashtags for all posts, such as #canal, but I’ve also added a flag to the dataset for whether the location is in Wales or not to add either a #wales or #england hashtag. When pulling a photo from Flickr the API also provides information on the tags that users have given to the photo (if any), these are now recycled and added to the message posted to Mastodon.