Proposal: BlackSky greeting and suggestion bot

[tajhlande]

Per a conversation with Rudy Fraser on BlueSky in this thread, I propose a bot to watch the #BlackSky hashtag and see if those users have subscribed to the BlackSky feed. If we see that they have not, we reply to their post with a message letting them know how they can subscribe to the feed.

Other constraints and requirements:

• Must clearly identify itself as a bot
• Should not reply to a given user more than once within some time window (a day? a week? a month?), which means it needs a place to store this information
• Needs access to the list of users / DIDs subscribed to BlackSky

[tajhlande]

I will note that I haven't written in Rust before, but I have decades of experience writing in other languages... Java, Javascript, Python, and other things I won't claim. I have written a similar bot in Python on Twitter in the past (now decommissioned).

[rudyfraser]

Python would be fine for this and there's already a 'bots' folder: https://github.com/blacksky-algorithms/rsky/tree/main/bots
Currently just has a twitter mirror bot in there but that can safely be renamed from main and a new .py script for the reply bot could be made.

You could use atproto.blue for the firehose subscriber and to make the reply: https://atproto.blue/en/latest/
For not replying to a user more than once within some window, some kind of in-memory or sqlite store would be fine for that.

You can see the membership schema here (

rsky/rsky-feedgen/src/schema.rs

Lines 68 to 75 in d109db4

	diesel::table! {
	membership (did, list) {
	did -> Varchar,
	included -> Bool,
	excluded -> Bool,
	list -> Varchar,
	}
	}

). A person is an existing member if included is true and list='blacksky'.

[tajhlande]

Cool thanks! I'll get started