Please Caption Mastodon Bot

Based on a bot I used to use on Twitter called Please Caption. It would message you when you forgot to put text descriptions (also know as 'alt text' or 'captions').

The difference with this bot is as you can send direct messages to statuses (toots) on Mastodon you can have a less spammy bot that messages privately.

Mastodon also lets you edit toots so you can easily add text descriptions.

How does the bot work?

You can follow the bot on @PleaseCaption@botsin.space.

When you post any media (images and videos) without text descriptions, it will respond with a message.

Installing the bot

1. Install dependancies

npm install

2. Create a Mastodon application and get the access token

   You can do this from the settings in Mastodon. There's a 'Development' section. Give the bot all permissions.

3. Add environment variables

• MASTODON_API_URL is the URL for the instance you're on.
• MASTODON_ACCESS_TOKEN is the access token from the previous step
• BOT_ENDPOINT is the endpoint you'll be sending requests to to get it to run tasks

3. Set-up script to ping bot endpoint.

The bot will unfollow and follow users ever so often when you hit a specific endpoint. If your server is 'https://example.com' and your BOT_ENDPOINT is 'specialsecret' the URL would be 'https://example.com/specialsecret'.

Then you can use something like Uptime Robot to send requests to that URL ever so often.

Changelog

• We began notifying people when they boosted un-captioned content (see PR) but we have reverted this feature because there isn't a reliable way to detect edits to boosts (see issue)