One of the nice things about the influx of Twitter users to Mastodon has been peoples' reaction when they find out that most of my bots are on the Fediverse, too. Even though they are still posting on Twitter, I've updated bots.mikelynch.org so that the front-page links go to the Mastodon versions.

Like most things, bot culture on Mastodon is different. It's easier to set up a bot, provided that you have some way of generating unique email addresses, whereas Twitter - last time I was using it - required phone numbers. Almost all of my bots are hosted on botsin.space, which is an instance run specifically for bot hosting, and which I can help support by kicking in to the Patreon. I made an exception for Victoria Botter because it seemed appropriate to host it on an Australian instance.

It's considered good etiquette in the Fediverse to make bots more of an opt-in experience than they are on Twitter: they shouldn't post into public timelines, and should have content warnings where appropriate. The content warnings can be part of the fun: for example, @GLOSSATORY announces the phrase it's definining in its content warning, so there's a bit of a build-up before you click through and find the definition.

Victoria Botter has a well-earned reputation for sexual perversity, and the emoji was added specifically so that we could cool it off. I'd kept it flying its freak flag without content warnings for a long time, but there's now an ongoing debate about whether or not CWs are good thanks to the new arrivals from Twitter, and I'm firmly on the side of CWs, so it's now a little more decent.