in a new series about making a Mastodon bot.

And you might be asking yourself,

okay, why are you making, what is Mastodon,

why are you making a Mastodon bot

and why should I care?

(laughing) I'm not really sure why you should care

but I'm going to try to answer those other questions

and you yourself can decide.

So this playlist is essentially a replacement

for Session 4:Twitter API and Bots with Node.js.

So I'm going to not redo 15.1 and 15.2

if you have never used Node before

or don't know what NPM is, you can go back

and watch those two videos,

but I'm going to start here basically with setting up,

setting up a Twitter, setting up a Mastodon.

And so what is Mastodon, why are we here?

So the Twitter API, which I used to create

these set of tutorials, recently changed quite a bit.

So it is much harder to signup for a new account

authorized for automation, making a bot

that posts in an automatic way to Twitter.

They also changed something about the API

called the streaming API, the way that you could

connect to Twitter and listen for certain events.

They changed the API and that is no longer available.

So while I encourage you to still experiment

with Twitter as a platform if you so like.

If today is your first day wanting to like

learn some stuff about node and social networking

and making up social networks and making a bot that posts,

Mastodon is going to be a more pleasurable,

easy-going experience for you that's going to allow you

to express your creativity in a much more immediate way.

And then there's another reason.

It has to do with this idea called decentralization.

So Twitter, I don't know if you've noticed,

it's kind of an awful place to be for the most part,

I don't want to get too far down that discussion,

but is there, is there another way?

Is there another way that we can communicate

with each other in a less centralized governed

and owned by large corporations kind of way.

And one way to do that

is with a concept called decentralization.

And Mastodon is an open-source, I don't know

maybe I should go somewhere where it actually says

what it is, well you can read it,

Follow friends and discover new ones.

Publish anything you want link, pictures, text, video.

All on a platform that is community-owned and ad free.

You know this is not like some sort of sponsored video

I'm experimenting with this platform

because it interests me and maybe it'll interest you.

It is open-source project.

You can see it's on GitHub here

and the decentralization runs

with a protocol called ActivityPub.

So let me try to give you an understanding

of what I mean by all this stuff.

What is Twitter, I don't know if anyone

should really answer that question but (laughing)

I will give you a little framework.

So Twitter is a company, they run probably a lot of servers.

You can be sitting on your laptop or your, you know,

phone, that's a phone apparently,

and you could sign up for an account on Twitter.

You could give yourself a Twitter user name

like @shiffman and then you could post messages

like the heart emoji and you can read other messages

that other people are sending into Twitter.

This is what you would refer to as a centralized platform.

The software that runs Twitter

is on a particular server, it's proprietary.

The way Twitter is governed in how, where,

what certain posts are allowed and aren't allowed

are all run by this same company.

And all of your data, all of the tweets

you've ever posted, all of your user information,

your password stuff, all of that is stored

on this centralized server.

The web didn't start with this idea

of a centralized platform, the idea was

many different nodes all interconnected,

being able to share and publish with each other.

And so there is, slowly entering the Zite guys now,

this idea of decentralized platforms.

Probably if you're not familiar with that

you're probably familiar with something

called Bitcoin, right, which runs on something

called blockchain which is a protocol

for decentralized financial transactions

which I am not going to make any videos about

at least anytime soon.

But, Mastodon is an open-source,

decentralized social network and it probably resembles

Twitter the most but there's some nuance to that.

So how is it different?

How does it work?

Well number one is there is no single server.

For example I have actually set up my own server

known as an instance.

And I'm not going to show you in this series

how to set up your own Mastodon instance,

but if that's of interest I certainly can provide

some resources to do that and I could do a video

about setting one up.

My instance is at a particular domain, choochoo.space,

this is my Mastodon instance,

so we'll call it Choo Choo.

There are other Mastodon instances.

For example mastodon.social, there is also,

let me erase some of this stuff here.

choochoo, mastodon.social, there are some other ones

that I have seen, for example, there is vis.social

which is an instance for people interested

in data visualization I presume.

There is another instance called botsin.space

which I am going to use in this series

to make a bot that runs on this botsin.space.

So the idea here is I've set up this instance.

Let's say you want to sign up for an account

with this particular instance.

You would go, I'll show you to in a second,

you would go there and you would sign up.

And so my user name, I'm a client, my like picture

of my like laptop over here which is strangely,

it's a weird bizarre angle, I am shiffman@choochoo.space.

So this is my local, this is my local Mastodon instance.

When I want to sign on, when I want to post something,

I post it, a sign on through this server,

I post it through this server,

my account is with this server.

But there is this concept called federation,

sounds like something out of Star Trek,

and it kind of is, which federation,

and I know I'm kind of getting close

to writing off the top,

is a way for all of these instances

to communicate with each other

in a decentralized fashion.

So if I post something saying like, hello,

I ate oatmeal for breakfast this morning,

this post that I make through here

will get propagated throughout

the entire network of Mastodon instances.

So there is both, when you're browsing Mastodon

there's both this idea of a local timeline

as well as a federated, or you could think of it

as global timeline.

And I'll show you this in a second.

I could browse and just look at all the posts,

I think they're called toots, all the toots,

for people who are at this instance

or all the toots from people all throughout

the federated universe of instances.

By the way the protocol that is used

for all of this, for all the communication

to propagate throughout the network,

did I mention this already?

It's called ActivityPub.

So the software that runs a particular server

is completely open-source.

It took me awhile to get it up and running

but I have it up and running here.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you

my account here, I'm going to show you botsin.space,

which is an instance designed for people

who want to make bots.

I'm going to sign up and create a bot on botsin.space

and interact with it here and then just show you

how the global network of stuff works.

So, the only prerequisites really for you

going to the next video is to have node installed

on your computer and you can go back

and watch my two sort of intro to node

for Twitter bots videos

and the same concepts there will apply

although I'm going to use different node packages.

Okay, so now we're over here.

This is the joinmastodon.org website.

You can find out a lot of information.

I would encourage you to click on this,

How it works, what is mastodon video

which is on YouTube which will explain all that

much better then I did, get started.

You could find an instance that you might like to join.

This is the GitHub open-source repository

with the software that's running.

Now, and now, dadadadadadada, here is my instance.

(whistle tooting)

The choochoo, people are notifying me

and saying hi and look, K. Wichmann

says, Look ma, I'm on the live stream.

Okay, excellent, please use caution when posting now.

So this is what it looks like.

You can see it looks like some other

social network service that you might sigh up for.

The difference is I am actually running the software

for it on my own server.

This is a server I happened to sign up

through DigitalOcean, which is a web hosting company,

that is not a sponsor but could be a sponsor,

hello DigitalOcean, but and you could set up your own.

And so what, but here's what I'm going to do.

You can look other instances like botsin.space,

this is the instance and you could sign up.

In the next video I'm actually going to sign up

for an account here so I can make a bot

that posts on it.

You can see here's some bots already

that are posting things.

The Cyberpainting biedermeier in the North Pole

inspired by Hubert Robert.

Ah, okay, the sequel is here, get ready

for guards 2: define.

I don't know what, please, have a tree picture.

This is a tree bot, come on, oh, let's make a tree bot

it's going to be so nice.

So again, these are things that you can do

on other services but Mastodon being open-source,

it's a really friendly and easy place

to get started with in terms of the API

which I'm sure will rapidly change,

and who knows how quickly this video

will go out of date, but that's the current spot.

So if you want to sign for a Mastodon account

not on choochoo.space or botsin.space,

a new one for yourself, you can come,

you can go to joinmastodon.org

and you can go look here.

You can look for something like, oh, you're an artist,

yes, and you speak English.

Oh, this dots social, there we go,

a social space for anyone

in data visualization, creative coding, etc.,

and now you can see this is vis.social

and you could sign up here.

Now once again even if you sign up at a certain instance,

that's just your name and address and your local instance,

but through federation, through ActivityPub,

through decentralization, you are still participating

in the broader world that is a Mastodon.

Okay, so what's going to happen next?

In the next video I am going to sign up

for a botsin.space account,