YSK: Mastodon bots work here tooβ€” there IS a remindme bot already!

lemonadebunny@lemmy.ca to You Should Know@lemmy.world – 675 points –

Why YSK: I've seen several commenters asking if there were specific bots such as RemindMe

However, there are so many bots already on mastodon that will federate with us! Check out botsin.space, a masto-instance specifically made for hosting bots

Just tag @remindme@mstdn.social and say the time after (I recommend you not do it on this post unless you have an actual reason though as it could spam their servers)

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This is insanely cool... I don't know why it never occurred to me that bots on other platforms could work here due to federation, but it makes so much sense. Thanks for sharing!

I also love the idea that we can have "bot instances" (as mentioned by OP) so an instance can decide if they want most bots or not. Not sure if communities themselves can exercise that kind of control but that would be amazing as well.

Add that to the rapidly growing lists of things that are improved on a decentralized platform!

Now all we need is a way to use the bots without clogging the comment section with bot commands.

Yeah I didn't want that 😭 I was hoping people would read to the end

Common sense and decency would suggest doing them as child comments so that the whole thread of them can be easily collapsed.

At least, you can add dm before the time so that the bot will respond to you privately.

Exactly! Now I'm sad/disappointed the threads will be drowned with commands.

Yes, it's neat to have these tools but it doesn't actually provide anything to the discussion at hand.

@remindme@mstdn.social in 5 minutes

How to find the available bots and their instructions on the botsin.space?

The thing about botsin.space is that it's open to anyone who wants to host a bot, so there really isn't any "centralized" listing besides what Mastodon offers by itself, and most bots generally have any instructions on their bios or pins.

Yep! botsin.space is just a server dedicated to it, while ANY server can have a bot

The closest I found to a "directory" was the local page of the instance but that just shows posts made by the bots

Yeah, that's what I found too. I was hoping to find a page that shows users of that instance. That way I can read up the bios of any interesting bots.

Uh, actually, how do you do the tagging? It looks like only one user here has managed it, for everyone else, the first '@' is being ignored.

Cool! But does the bot have to know of this community to see mentions? How does fediverse tagging work?

Adding a user's @user@domain.com in a comment is - to really simplify it - just like sending them an email. The bot get a message that you posted something, it process the message and "emails" you back at that time.

Sweet - makes sense. Just tested it on an obscure community on a small instance. Worked!

That's too bad. Karma and bots are two things I was happy to get away from.

At least it seems on here so far bots have to be explicitly called for.

We'll see. It was like that at first on reddit too.
Either way, this post is impossible to read any real discussions because of the bot.

Is there a bot for polls?

Yes! I found @Pollsforfun@mastodon.social for that

However, I don't think polls federate on Lemmy and haven't tested it yet so it might not work here

@remindme@mstdn.social dm in 1 minute

Piggybacking on your comment to lessen spam at top. @remindme@mstdn.social in 1 minute DM