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mastodon-list-bot

Oh no, the evil algorithm is back!

A small program to generate "programmatic" lists in Mastodon, as a way to experiment with different kinds of home feeds.

Mastodon's strict chronological timeline favors frequent posters over less frequent ones. In my experience this causes a problem where your feed is dominated by a few hardcore, big-follower-number posters, while you're missing out on content from less frequent posters (such as Twitter holdouts, or your mutuals).

Mastodon's solution to this is lists, but lists require curation and effort to maintain. So what if those lists updated themselves? Read more about motivation

How to use

Create these lists to get started:

  • #mutuals -- contains all users who you follow and who also follow you.
  • #last_status_at>1d & last_status_at<4d -- contains all users who haven't posted yesterday, but sometime within the past three days.
  • #last_status_at>3d -- contains all users who haven't posted in over three days.

Then, in the client of your choice, add those lists as columns or tabs, so you can easily switch between home timeline and alternative timelines. In Mastodon web they are already tabs, in Phanpy I recommend the column layout, in Tusky you can add them as tabs as well.

Then, head over to list-bot.woodland.cafe and # with your Mastodon account. Click sync, and the bot should start adding users to the list (asynchronously).

The bot has been successfully tested on GoToSocial as well.

Syntax reference

  • #last_status_at supports days (1d), weeks (1w), months (1m). It does not support numbers larger than 999 (9999m is invalid)
  • #last_status_at supports operators < and >. Other operators may be added if it's useful, but so far it doesn't seem that it would be.
  • #mutuals takes no arguments of any kind.
  • Clauses can be chained with &. Other operators or parenthesis are not supported.

List names do not have to match exactly, they only have to end with the specified string. For example, it is permitted to name a list My best friends #mutuals, so that your preferred list name is shown while the "machine-readable configuration" is still there. There can currently however only be one # in the name.

Self-hosting (CLI)

list-bot comes as a CLI to put into crontab, and as a webservice. For single-user purposes, it's probably easier to run it from the CLI.

Go to Development in your Mastodon account, and create a new access token.

Then, run:

RUST_LOG=info cargo run run-once --host=mastodon.social --token=...

Your lists are now populated with new accounts. Run this program periodically to update it (this both adds and removes accounts).

This tool hammers the API a lot during sync. It is likely that while it is running, it will encounter rate limits, which it will handle gracefully. Do not run this program more than once per day.

License

MIT