Stork (pleroma-bot)

Mirror your favorite Twitter accounts in the Fediverse, so you can follow their updates from the comfort of your favorite instance. Or migrate your own to the Fediverse using a Twitter archive.

You can find this project at:

GitHub	Gitlab	Gitea
pleroma-bot	pleroma-bot	pleroma-bot

Supports:

Mastodon	Pleroma	Misskey

Introduction

After using the pretty cool mastodon-bot for a while, I found it was lacking some features which were of use to me.

For precisely those cases I've written this Python project that automates them, asking such info to Twitter's API and updating the relevant fields on the Pleroma API/Mastodon API/Misskey API side.

Features

So basically, it does the following:

• Can parse a Twitter archive, moving all your tweets to the Fediverse
• Can use an RSS feed as the source of the tweets to post
• Retrieves latest tweets and posts them on the Fediverse account if their timestamp is newer than the last post.
  • Can filter out RTs or not
  • Can filter out replies or not
  • Supports Twitter threads
• Media retrieval and upload of multiple attachments. This includes:
  • Video
  • Images
  • Animated GIFs
  • Polls
• Retrieves profile info from Twitter and updates it in on the Fediverse account. This includes:
  • Display name
  • Profile picture
  • Banner image
  • Bio text
• Adds some metadata fields to the Fediverse account, pointing to the original Twitter account or custom text.

Installation

Using pip

$ pip install pleroma-bot

Using a package manager

Here's a list of the available packages.

Package type	Link	Maintainer
AUR (Arch)	https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/python-pleroma-bot	robertoszek

Usage

$ pleroma-bot [-c CONFIG] [-l LOG] [--noProfile] [--daemon] [--forceDate [FORCEDATE]] [-a ARCHIVE]

Bot for mirroring one or multiple Twitter accounts in Pleroma/Mastodon.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -c CONFIG, --config CONFIG
                        path of config file (config.yml) to use and parse. If
                        not specified, it will try to find it in the current
                        working directory.
  -d, --daemon          run in daemon mode. By default it will re-run every
                        60min. You can control this with --pollrate
  -p POLLRATE, --pollrate POLLRATE
                        only applies to daemon mode. How often to run the
                        program in the background (in minutes). By default is
                        60min.
  -l LOG, --log LOG     path of log file (error.log) to create. If not
                        specified, it will try to store it at your config file
                        path
  -n, --noProfile       skips Fediverse profile update (no background image,
                        profile image, bio text, etc.)
  --forceDate [FORCEDATE]
                        forces the tweet retrieval to start from a specific
                        date. The twitter_username value (FORCEDATE) can be
                        supplied to only force it for that particular user in
                        the config
  -s, --skipChecks      skips first run checks
  -a ARCHIVE, --archive ARCHIVE
                        path of the Twitter archive file (zip) to use for
                        posting tweets.
  -t THREADS, --threads THREADS
                        number of threads to use when processing tweets
  -L LOCKFILE, --lockfile LOCKFILE
                        path of lock file (pleroma-bot.lock) to prevent
                        collisions with multiple bot instances. By default it
                        will be placed next to your config file.
  --verbose, -v
  --version             show program's version number and exit

Before running

There are multiple options for using the bot.

You can either choose to use:

• A Twitter archive
• An RSS feed
• Guest tokens
• Twitter tokens with a Developer account

You'll need to create a configuration file and obtain the Fediverse tokens for your accounts no matter what you choose to use.

If you plan on retrieving tweets from an account which has their tweets protected, you'll also need the following:

• Consumer Key and Secret. You'll find them on your project app keys and tokens section at Twitter's Developer Portal
• Access Token Key and Secret. You'll also find them on your project app keys and tokens section at Twitter's Developer Portal. Alternatively, you can obtain the Access Token and Secret by running this locally, while being logged in with a Twitter account which follows or is the owner of the protected account

You'll may also need Elevated access in your Twitter's API project in order for the bot to function properly.

Refer to the docs for more info about this.

Configuration

Create a config.yml file in the same path where you are calling pleroma-bot (or use the --config argument to specify a different path).

There's a config example in this repo called config.yml.sample that can help you when filling yours out.

For more information you can refer to the "Configuration" page on the docs.

Here's what a minimal config looks like:

# Change this to your target Fediverse instance
pleroma_base_url: https://pleroma.instance
# How many tweets to gather per-user in every execution
# Twitter's API hard limit is 3,200
max_tweets: 40
# Twitter bearer token
twitter_token: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
users:
- twitter_username: User1
  pleroma_username: MyPleromaUser1
  # Mastodon/Pleroma bearer token
  pleroma_token: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Running

If you're running the bot for the first time it will ask you for the date you wish to start retrieving tweets from (it will gather all from that date up to the present). If you leave it empty and just press enter it will default to the oldest date that Twitter's API allows ('2010-11-06T00:00:00Z') for tweet retrieval.

To force this behaviour in future runs you can use the --forceDate argument (be careful, no validation is performed with the already posted toots/posts by that Fediverse account and you can end up with duplicates posts/toots!).

Additionally, you can provide a twitter_username if you only want to force the date for one user in your config.

For example:

$ pleroma-bot --forceDate WoolieWoolz

If the --noProfile argument is passed, the profile picture, banner, display name and bio will not be updated on the Fediverse account. However, it will still gather and post the tweets following your config's parameters.

NOTE: An error.log file will be created at the path from which pleroma-bot is being called.

crontab entry example

(everyday at 6:15 AM) update profile and (every 10 min.) post new tweets:

# Post tweets every 10 min
*/10 * * * * cd /home/robertoszek/myvenv/ && . bin/activate && pleroma-bot noProfile

# Update pleroma profile with Twitter info every day at 6:15 AM
15 6 * * * cd /home/robertoszek/myvenv/ && . bin/activate && pleroma-bot

NOTE: If you have issues with cron running the bot you may have to specify the full path of your Python executable

*/10 * * * * /usr/bin/python /usr/local/bin/pleroma-bot

Screenshots

Acknowledgements

These projects proved to be immensely useful, they are Python wrappers for the Mastodon API and Twitter API respectively:

• Mastodon.py
• twitter-python

They were part of the impetus for this project, challenging myself to not just import them and use them, instead opting to directly do the heavy lifting with built-in python modules.

That and mastodon-bot not working after upgrading the Pleroma instance I was admin on 😅. This event lead to repurposing this project (initially it only updated the profile info) and adding the tweet gathering and posting capabilities.

Contributing

Patches, pull requests, and bug reports are more than welcome, please keep the style consistent with the original source.

License

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2023 Roberto Chamorro / project contributors

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Tested and confirmed working against :

• Pleroma BE 2.4.2
• Mastodon v3.2.1
• Misskey 12.110.1
• Twitter API v1.1 and v2