Bots I've met on the Fediverse
2025-02-27
Wandering around in the Fediverse, every once in a while I run into a bot. It might be weird or ordinary, boring or exciting, interesting or completely absurd. Here, I want to share those I'm always excited to see again, and thus think they are worth sharing.
I Hope This Email Finds You
First bot on this list is also my favorite. I'll let it introduce itself:
Posts (...) completions to the sentence "I hope this email finds you." All content is sourced from Google Books, based on searches for phrases that start with "finds you."
Pretty simple, right?
Every time I'm writing an e-mail, I have the urge to use one of this bot's creations.
I find it incredible how amusing a bot posting literal nonsense can be, especially in an AI age where an LLM can spit out hundreds of sentences like this in a few seconds. That wouldn't be so funny though, would it?
How to do anything
This bot is similar to the previous one in its dadaist nature. It mixes up random wikiHow article headings and illustrations.
Whether you try to find sense it its cryptic advice, or just go for a laugh, I'm sure it will be glad to see someone listening to what it has to say.
As the Film Ends
Have you ever opened a random book from your grandma's bookshelf and read the last page, or last sentence of it? There's something exciting about it, even when you have no idea about the context. Maybe because of it.
If you did, you and this bot are gonna love each other!
Its father explains its inner workings well:
Most Wikipedia pages for a given film provide at least a brief plot synopsis. Using the sum total of all film pages on Wikipedia as a corpus, this bot picks a random film and posts the final sentence from its plot summary. Spoilers are definitely possible, but given the depth of the corpus it'll usually be a film you've never heard of.
transect575
transect575 is another bot whose introduction I'll leave to its creator:
When I worked for REDACTED GOVERNMENT AGENCY I saw a lot of aerial survey data from people looking for whales in the sea. Usually this includes useful information like the number of animals, whether they are juvenile or adult and weather conditions. They also usually included a comment field. So I scraped that out and this bot makes haikus from it.
Its home is a GoToSocial instance, so I can't embed its posts here as easily as those of bots living on Mastodon.
Click here to view transect575's haikus
You Can't Spell
This bot is only six days old when I'm writing this, but it already managed to say smarter things than lot of adults I know have ever said. Did you know that you can't spell warm-hearted without meth award?
Shakespearean Insult Bot
Nothing much to say about the Shakespearean Insult Bot, who walks around the Fediverse and insults whoever crosses its path. Its unloved (those not starred/boosted/commented) insults are deleted after two weeks, which is a pretty clever feature that the How to do anything bot could borrow.
SimCity2000 Traffic Helicopter
Last bot on this list is a bit different than the rest. It's not funny nor nonsensical, but deserves its place more than any other.
Another project of @jplebreton@mastodon.social, creator of the As the Film Ends bot, SimCity2000 Traffic Helicopter flies above user-created cities and posts a random glimpse of a cityscape.
Beautiful!