Wilbot

Wilbot is a MegaHAL chatbot for Mastodon written in python.

MegaHAL is a Markov chain-based chatbot engine originally designed in C in the 1990s; it was popular as a module for eggdrop IRC bots. It was ported to python in the 2000s
Mastodon is a federated micro-blogging system built on the ActivityPub protocol.

This script allows you to turn a Mastodon account into a chatbot that can form basic replies to users based on text it has learned previously. It is designed to only learn from public posts from mentions and users it follows. Users can get the bot to follow them using @botname follow

Usage

Install the following modules:

pip3 install Mastodon.py megahal prompt_toolkit bs4 pytz

Run:

python3 wilbot.py

Copy your bot user's access token to a file called token.secret in the same directory as wilbot.py.

Config (after first run) in wilbot.ini. Set instance_url to the URL of the Mastodon instance (e.g. https://example.com) and timezone to your timezone string (e.g. America/St_Johns), and that's it.

You can also configure whether and when the bot auto-posts, and you can add an openweathermap.org API key and city name to have it announce the current weather at the end of these auto-posts. The auto_times string is a series of comma-separated 24-hour H:MM times, e.g.:

auto_times = 0:00, 6:00, 12:00, 18:00

More options are available in the interactive back-end that runs when you start the script. The bot is online until you use /exit. It is recommended to run it in a tmux or screen session instead of forking into the background so that you have access to this back-end.