it's a me, italian gramsci! i tweet-a da thoughts i have while inna da prison.

a mastodon and twitter bsky bot for node. toots and tweets skeets fragments from the prison notebooks. it's written in typescript and runs on node.js.

you can run it on your computer and even remix it into something new! you'll need node and git installed. if you install node manually, you should match the node version listed in the .node-version file — but instead of installing node directly i recommend using fnm, which can automatically handle installing and switching node versions by detecting .node-version files.

once you're set, run:

git clone https://github.com/lostfictions/italian-gramsci
cd italian-gramsci
corepack enable # enables use of the pnpm package manager
pnpm install
pnpm dev

running pnpm dev will generate an image and save it to a file on your computer. when posting to the internet, this bot runs using github actions' scheduled events. check out the workflow file for more details.

if you clone the repository you can run your own remixed version that posts to mastodon and bsky using github actions too! no need to edit the workflow file — you'll just need to set some environment variables in the github repository settings:

• MASTODON_TOKEN: a Mastodon user API token
• BSKY_USERNAME: the bot's username on Bluesky
• BSKY_PASSWORD: the app password for the bot's account on Bluesky
• PERSIST_DIR: the directory in which to store state, like which lines have already been posted. (default: persist)

additionally, MASTODON_SERVER (hardcoded in src/env.ts) controls the mastodon instance to which API calls should be made (usually where the bot user lives.)

this bot uses dotenv, so if you're testing things locally, you can stick any of the above environment variables in a file named .env in the project root. (it's gitignored, so there's no risk of accidentally committing private API tokens you put in there.) when running on github actions, state (like which line of prose was last posted) is persisted across bot runs by pushing it to an "orphan" git branch. the action is configured to do this for you automatically.

Important

as part of this branch-based persistence approach, you'll need the orphan git branch to already exist in the repo you're pushing to. the branch is appropriately named persist; if you've forked this repo with all its branches, this should be included. if not -- well, it's a bit clunky to create. for now, the recommended approach is to make sure your local clone has the correct remote github repo set and that the file persist/statuses.json exists locally (you may have to run pnpm regen). then from the root of the repo run npx gh-pages -d persist -b persist.

more bots?