2.3.6. A program that makes one Mastodon post

Choose Social Media Platform: Bluesky | Reddit | Discord | Mastodon | No Coding

Below is a computer program written in the Python programming language. The program will make a Mastodon post. The post will say: “This post was made by a computer program!”. Since this is a computer program that posts on Mastodon, we would call this program a Mastodon bot.

Don’t worry if you don’t understand any of this Python code yet; we will build an understanding of code like this throughout the book.

from mastodon import Mastodon

mastodon = Mastodon(
    api_base_url = "https://mastodon.social", 
    access_token = "m#5@_fake_access_token_$%Ds")

mastodon.toot("This post was made by a computer program!")

Though you may not understand anything in the above code yet, I want to point out a couple things:

• The code above is full of English words like “import”, “access”, “token”, and “toot,” which may help you guess the meaning of the code.

• There are also other symbols as well, though being used in a different way than in normal English, symbols like =, _, ., :, (, and ), as well as some unusual spacing

• The indented lines of code gives good hints as to what it is doing: Mastodon(...) where the instance name (mastodon.social) and the access_token are given is where your Mastodon bot logs in, and toot has the information to make as a new post.

• Note that the line with Mastodon is where you would put your Mastodon “access token” (see the page on setting up your Bluesky bot). Once you put your own “access token” in that locations, then this code will make a Mastodon post

Fig. 2.2 A Mastodon post made by running the code above with the account information for “@info103_teacher@mastodon.social”.

We will go through that example code in more detail next.