With the announced shutdown of botsin.space (https://muffinlabs.com/posts/2024/10/29/10-29-rip-botsin-space/), we need to find a new home for the CheerLights bot.
Right now, https://mas.to/ seems to be a pretty inviting home for friendly bots; would that cause federation problems for anybody?
- @silvermoon82, The Dev

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/979764107a8d491a8277b3b0800844c0 is a very rudimentary Apple shortcut to read the current CheerLights color. See @CheerLights for how to set the color. H/T to @silvermoon82 for the Fediverse interface.

@muffinista
The domain is bsky.brid.gy; looks like we don't instance-block it here.

Hey, @muffinista, does botsin.space block the bsky bridge?

New @CheerLights blog post is a go! Green!
https://jtlog.wordpress.com/2023/10/21/no-code-lametric-cheerlights-with-mqtt/

@Steampunk_Prof @cymplecy
That’s odd, the bot is supposed to follow back automatically.
Anyway, it’s following you now and things should work correctly - give it a try now?

We should be back, but the storm's expected to last a while on & off, so connection might be spotty.

Power is out here, so the bot is offline for a little bit.

The bot will now auto-follow-back, so if you follow the bot it shouldn't miss any of your hashtag posts.
I also went through and followed all existing followers.
The /follow and /unfollow commands still work, if you want to be followed without following the bot yourself.

The way hashtags work on Fedi, this bot should follow you for your #CheerLights posts to be picked up reliably (but a post with a full mention should always work!)
It’s impolite on Fedi for a bot to follow people pre-emptively, so this bot has no auto-follow at all -- even if you follow the bot, it won’t follow you until you send it a message with “/follow”.
Is that too far the other way? Should the bot automatically follow back?

Something broke between the Masto API and the bot yesterday, now fixed and the colours should flow.
If you ever need support with the bot or notice it’s broken, you can reach out to @silvermoon82, or visit the CheerLights discord at https://discord.gg/mCUKYVEx

Interruption in service this morning, should be back to normal soon.
Remember, kids: error-wait-reconnect, because error-reconnect can turn into a request storm and service admins notice when you cross a few tens of thousands of requests per hour.
(shout out to @muffinista, admin of botsin.space, for being one of the good, kind, and forgiving ones! 💜)

Happy #FollowFriday some of the thousands of good bots have migrated here from #Twitter after the crippling of the free API there.

Twitter's loss, as the #Fediverse gains. It will become a much more informed, quirky, fun, and innovative space here because of it. Can't wait to see what they do with a really free API.

@scream

@year_progress

@possumeveryhour

@lastquake

@picardtips

@zoom_earth

@mobydick

@sadserver

@earthquake

@resistbot

@youare_bot

And of course: @botwiki

twitter #SocialMedia

@ross EFF's first Senior Fellow for Decentralization, with an excellent piece rebutting the nonsense that the WaPo columnist wrote about #mastodon and the #fediverse 👇🏾

"The question isn't if the fediverse can replace Twitter, but if protocols can usurp platforms in our life online. With enough momentum the fediverse can be the fabric of the social web, incorporating existing systems like Tumblr and Medium and outright replacing stragglers."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/02/breadth-fediverse

Hi, Fediverse!
This bot connects the Fediverse to the CheerLights project.

To learn more about CheerLights, check out https://CheerLights.com

To change CheerLights all over the world, mention @CheerLights (the botsin.space part is important, there are a couple others on the Fediverse) or use the hashtag #CheerLights and include a colour in your toot. Your message will be sent to the CheerLights controller and lights will update all over the world.

In other words, CheerLights is moving away from Twitter, and now this Masto bot is talking directly to the source, birdsite-free.

goodnight twitter, public square
goodnight blue checks everywhere
api will go to sleep
3rd party devs no longer tweet
goodnight Jack and all that fuss
goodnight twitter, goodnight musk

🎉 Node-RED 3.1.0-beta.1 is now available.

🔒 Locking flows
📃 Much more useful context menu
🧜‍♀️ Mermaid doc support

https://discourse.nodered.org/t/node-red-3-1-0-beta-1-released/74644

Good news, friends!
The folks behind the Cheerlights project have a plan to outlive the Twitter API, so we can all keep glowing together!
More details to come.

So, this is bad news. I've reached out to the upstream Cheerlights folks, hopefully we'll be able to keep Fedi connected.