Terence Eden's ActivityBot Is a Simple Two-File PHP Project for Creating Mastodon, ActivityPub Bots

Terence Eden has created possible the simplest solution for putting a bot on the ActivityPub-powered Fediverse: a two-file self-hosted write-only PHP project that aims to fill in the hole left by the impending closure of popular bot-hosting service botsin.space.

"Want to self-host your own bots now botsin.space is going away? I've made the simplest possible server just for you," Eden explains. "Upload two files to your server (index.php and .htaccess), fill in a couple of details, and… that's it! This is designed for write-only bots. It isn't interactive, it won't store or reply to messages sent to it, but it will post hashtags, links, mentions, and images."

botsin.space was created by developer Colin Mitchell as a Mastodon microblogging instance dedicated to automated posting, and hosts everything from bots that publish pictures of animals cute and otherwise on the hour every hour to comedy role-play accounts pretending to be Star Trek characters attempting to search the Federation's equivalent of the World Wide Web. Unfortunately, growing costs and maintenance requirements mean that Mitchell is retiring the instance in December — leaving a lot of bots looking for a new home.

Eden's project isn't a full Mastodon instance like botsin.space, but it runs on the same ActivityPub protocol — meaning it can take part in the "Fediverse," federating with other ActivityPub services including Mastodon. Once set up, Mastodon users can discover and follow the bots and see them in their feeds as usual — though while they'll appear to be able to send replies, they'll never reach the bot creator.

Eden has published the source code for the project, dubbed ActivityBot, to GitLab under the permissive CRAPL v0 Beta 1 license; a sample bot running on the platform is available at bot.viii.fi.