a bot renaissance, the botissance

a crop of Pallas and the Centaur by Botticelli, 1482

One of the things that hit me the hardest about Twitter's change of ownership was the monetization of the API in June 2023. I don't think any of us had any hopes for what would happen after that switch, in fact I think a lot of users expected the worse; for me that change was one of the first for a long fall for Twitter and my own eventual departure from the platform. In an attempt to battle harmful bots, or at least make money from their attempts, Twitter's changes had also killed off a vibrant environment of non harmful bots and other niche autoposters, and personally, as someone who deeply appreciates a good bot/auto account, their loss immediately brought down the vibes on my timeline.

Bots and niche accounts with automated or scheduled posts share a lot of DNA with the endless fan pages of the early web, and because of that they carry forward one of its best qualities: unabashed interest. A lot of these kinds of places were (at least partially) killed off by the advent of an internet culture that created the concept of cringe and ironic interests. It's within this context, of Twitter getting taken over by that exact mindset, that my sadness over the loss of bots can be placed. Luckily though, the internet seems to be swinging back around to killing the part of yourself that cringes- and because of that, when I finally did make the jump over to Bluesky - I was not only happy to see the return of favorite accounts but was also determined not to let the chance of making my own slip past again.

bots + I

The death of Twitter bots instantly made me regret never taking the time to build out the only bot idea I had ever had for it: the millennials kill bot. Between 2017 and 2021, there were dozens of news articles proclaiming that millennials were indiscriminately murdering various industries, like the diamond industry or casual dining chains. Here is an article from last year with a handy list. For me, by the time I moved to Bluesky, I felt the moment had passed.

I had a new idea though, and partially from the excitement of a new platform was determined, but I still needed a bit of a push. It was only after a long time tech friend built her own astrology bot that I was inspired enough to start on one of my own.

My first bot, the recession indicator bot, started as a very similar idea to millennials kill, only instead of scraping news APIs, it would scrape the atproto firehose and repost anyone who used the phrase. I didn't know then that atproto heavily discourages bot interaction without permission, but when I got to that section of the documentation I saw the wisdom in it and decided to change direction. (Plus I had no interest in the cost associated with scraping, etc.)

Instead, the bot became a phrase generator, a simple 2 file Node app that inserted an adjective noun pair generated from the library Sentencer into one of 3 phrases. It's no disc horse, and even though I have been thinking about switching it up lately, it still holds a special place in my heart as my first bot.

After recession indicator I was out of ideas until I came across a post riffing on year progress bots with a progress bar for the American Century of Humiliation. Like my other 2 bot ideas I had to take advantage of a popular phrase and so the american century of humiliation bot was born.

Structurally this one is pretty much the same as recession indicator bot, only with the added annoyances of 2 things most software folks would rather not deal with: dates and Unicode. The JavaScript Date object luckily had my back for the former: the progress counts from January 20th, 2025, the inauguration of the main catalyst of the century. This part of the bot was also recently refactored to take advantage of the new JavaScript Temporal object (via a polyfill) which makes dealing with time a lot more user friendly with relative methods like since() and until().

Humiliation bot also taught me to beware how Unicode characters look in my terminal versus how they look in a Bluesky post: dark shade ▓ and light shade ░ looked totally reversed, but it wasn't anything a few now deleted test posts couldn't reveal.

the boticellis

A few months ago there was a small resurgence in Bluesky's Starter Packs; at that point after over a year on the platform and having followed dozens of bots, it hit me that maybe folks would want to see a list and share the joy. So below, pulled from my own follows, is that starter pack. These are mostly artisanal and free range1 and mostly safe for work.

recommended bsky bots or niche posters

In addition, here are a few banger accounts from the list that I want to highlight:

french republican calendar

View post on Bluesky

The first bot I looked for when I started making the move to Bluesky was this one, and honestly it probably had some influence in me finally moving over.

The French Republican (or Revolutionary) Calendar is a very cool and whimsical remnant of the utterly world upending time period of the French Revolution. Drunk on reform, nothing seemed off limits and in 1792 the First French Republic adopted a new, very secular calendar from a special committee project spearheaded by the politician Charles Gilbert Romme.

The funnest parts of the calendar are the names of the months and the fact that every individual day celebrates something.

Even if you don't necessarily know the calendar, depending on which histories you studied in school you might already recognize some of the month names, like Brumaire (The Eighteenth Brumaire), Thermidor (The Coup of 9 Thermidor) or Prairial (The Revolt of 1 Prairial Year III). The names meanings, derived from French, Latin or Greek, get straight to the point: Brumaire from the Latin word for winter starts at the end of October, Thermidor from the Greek word for summer heat starts in late July and Prairial from the French meaning of prairie starts at the end of May.

As for the days, there's a ton of celebration of plants, but for colder months they had to get inventive with it. For example, the month Nivose, which started in late December and ended in late January, is full of days celebrating various minerals, a few common tools and 3 big companion animals: the dog, the cat and the rabbit.

Everyday, at midnight Parisian time, this bot keeps a little part of the French revolutionary spirit going in the decidedly not of any lord Year 234.

tweegeemee

View post on Bluesky

I hope I can do this justice because as a coder myself it is so incredibly cool.

tweegeemee is written in the programming language Clojure and it's images are generated from mathematical formulas. These formulas are judged based on post interactions from various social media sources - the more interaction the more likely that formula will be a part of the top 5 formulas. Out of those top 5 formulas one or two are then selected to be used to generate the next image. To put it metaphorically, as the author has, the formulas become "genes" that show up in subsequent generations as the images "evolve".

I adore tweegeemee, not only as a beautiful example of artistic coding, but now also as an example of something cool that's generative but not AI.

USSR Pictures

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I am a huge fan of Soviet visual design, and imho nobody made a poster like they did. They made posters about pretty much anything and everything, not just propaganda, and a lot of them. Food science, like the happy cereals above, work safety, like this amazing colorful warning about being sloshed, and public safety, like this STI prevention poster, are subjects that we have tons of examples of.

Come for the posters and stay for celebrated women WWII snipers, giant monuments to the motherland and some of the best 80s street fashion I've ever seen - but, be aware, sometimes they do post pictures of the Goodest Girl Ever, Laika and it might make you tear up a bit.

mac themes garden

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Mac Themes Garden is a lovely reminder of a time when anyone and everyone could be a designer. Every hour it posts a theme that was made for Kaleidoscope a 3rd party theme manager that handled GUI changes before the Appearance Manager showed up in Mac OS 8. It's a beautiful record of a time when customization was king, even if the designs weren't all that practical, and reminds me of another one of the greatest customization outlets of all time: Winamp skins.

iss piss tracker

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To me, the ISS Piss Tracker is the pinnacle of open government API use and a testament to the curiosity of software folks who took the time to find this particular data stream. Huge kudos NASA for making literally everything available and for the makers with a sense of humor who make things like this everyday.

the 1 instance of AI use, that I am aware of, comes from a small model