ICYMI (ADN) tries to identify and amplify interesting toots about arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation. I wrote a bit more about the bot earlier this week.
I like what ICYMI (law) does but recognise that it benefits from a larger community of active tooters, a few regularly-used hashtags, and one or two instances which are dedicated to practitioners and interested participants. That bot really has to digest or distill things down from a firehose.
Today ICYMI (ADN) looks a lot like an aggregator of a few accounts, mainly Nukes of Hazard and Arms Control Now, because I’ve not yet found many other active tooters on ADN topics, there are many hashtags (all used rarely), and there’s no single instance dedicated to ADN.
Motivation
In part, ICYMI (ADN) is intended to help discovery for people who have an interest in ADN. Without having to add dozens of accounts or dozens of hashtags to follow, it can provide a somewhat regular (currently approximately daily) survey of what is being said in the Fediverse. I hope that people might follow it, and it could motivate more engagement on ADN topics in the Fediverse, leading to more discussion and awareness of these issues (and that people care about them).
How to make it better
While waiting for the growth of a larger Fediverse ADN community, I’m considering three things to bulk out the content a little.
The first, and easiest, is likely to move the bot to a more populated instance. It “listens” on several hashtags but will only hear them if they’re showing up in its home feed, which depends on what toots are coming to it. So I may try to move it. If I do, this would be why.
The second approach which would be relatively straightforward would be to add in amplification of items of a few RSS feeds into the bot’s output. One candidate would be UNODA’s rss feed. Instead of putting RSS capability into the existing code, I’d use an existing RSS-to-toot system. Of course, once an active account starts publishing on behalf of the organisation, the RSS-to-toot transfer for that feed would be stoped.
The third approach is to look at some of the more general purpose mastodon accounts which sometimes toot about ADN issues. One example could be EU at the UN - Geneva #Multila (which itself is an automated mirror); another could be Germany in the United Nations. These feeds address many issues but often address ADN issues. I may adjust the bot code so that it can follow certain accounts but apply a hashtag filter to them so it only pays attention to toots on relevant issues.
Where else it might be used
As the bot code currently is, it could be used for other communities which want to run a bot dedicated to their interests. It may even work better for some of them. I’m trying to keep the design so that moderation of the bot could be done with the same tools used for managing any other account, and a minimum of other typing.
I hope to spend some time in the next few days documenting the current workflow so that anyone wanting to try this can RTFD – but they’ll also be welcome to be in touch.