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?
Create a list with any of the following names. The bot will then start populating it.
#last_status_at<1d-- contains all users which haven't posted in a day or more.#last_status_at<1w-- contains all users which haven't posted in a week or more.#last_status_at<1m-- contains all users which haven't posted in a month or more.#mutuals-- contains all users who you follow and who also follow you.
Variations such as 2d, 3d, 8m are permitted.
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.
List clauses can not be composed, so creating a list of mutuals who haven't posted in a week is not possible right now.
This bot is available as a webservice at list-bot.woodland.cafe. Sign in with Mastodon and get started.
Create an empty list with the name #last_status_at<1w. The program will recognize it
by its name, and overwrite its contents with users who haven't posted in a week.
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 list is now populated with new accounts. Run this program periodically to update it (this both adds and removes accounts).
This bot 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.
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