note: this bot is no longer running. it originally ran from January 2022 until June 2023, when drew toothpaste asked me to stop, and then again until August 2023 just writing captions as replies to the official account. this felt passive aggressive to me and I was kind of tired of captioning skeletons at that point anyway so I stopped for real. "from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as dasoupz0ne" remains the most beautiful line of code I've ever written.

What is this?

I run a Mastodon account at @da_shared_z0ne@is.nota.live, which reposts memes from da share z0ne on Twitter, with added image descriptions. This was something I (and, I think, quite a few other people) had wanted for a while, so I finally knuckled down and made it. The Python script I use can be found here.

How does this work?

The idea is, I check my RSS feeds for the day, one of which is a nitter feed for @dasharez0ne. When they post something, I go to my terminal and run dasharez0ne.py with the URL of that post as an argument. The script downloads the text of the post, as well as the image, and tries to run an OCR program on it (this rarely has good results, given the stylized nature of most of the images). It then shows me the image and a text editor so that I can edit (or, more commonly, write from scratch) the image description. I save and exit the text editor and it automatically posts the image to the account, with the source URL in a reply. Boosts, typically, follow.

Due to the nature of this script I can repost da share z0ne memes from before I started this bot. Go ahead and DM it a link if there's one you'd like to see.

Could this be used as a semi-automated crossposter for other Twitter accounts?

With a little tweaking, sure.

There's a few hardcoded account names, but even a non-programmer ought to be able to identify and replace those strings.

The biggest consideration is that this bot expects there to be some post text + one image. It would take considerably more fiddling for it to handle, say, more than one image.