Mastodon top articles

Simple bot that posts top articles linked from Mastodon. Similar in scope to Twitter's Top Articles feature. See here for an example of the output.

One-time setup

Create a conda env and install requirements.txt inside of it.

Bot requires to got through an OAuth sequence. Use ngrok to create a tunnel to your local machine, e.g. ngrok http 5000.

• Set the correct setting for the ngrok URL in settings.py
• Run python oauth_server.py to start the OAuth server loop
• Run python authorize_app.py to authorize the app

Note that your Mastodon account needs to:

• Be identified as a bot
• Have HTML enabled in the settings (go to Preferences > Other > Default format for toots > HTML)

Retrieve top articles and post to Mastodon

• Set the various settings in settings.py. You will need an OpenAI API key
• python get_toots.py grabs the hottest toots from the last 24 hours and summarizes them using GPT3.5/GPT-4
• python post_toots.py posts the toots to Mastodon

Cron

To set the bot to run automatically at 8AM, add this entry to your crontab (default location: /etc/crontab):

0 8 * * * cd /path/to && ./get_and_post.sh

Edit get_and_post.sh to use the correct conda environment. Make sure to chmod +x get_and_post.sh to make it executable.