fedigroup.py 1.0.8

Emulate group accounts on Mastodon/Pleroma

fedigroup.py - emulate group accounts on Mastodon

What is this?

Some social media platforms allow groups of users to post into a unified "group" timeline/instance/whatever you want to call it. This is currently not possible on Mastodon without giving all members full login credentials to a group. fedigroup.py is an attempt to solve this specific use case.

How does it work?

fedigroup.py has to be set up on a computer and run as a service. It reads the notifications from the Mastodon account it is connected to and filters them for messages to repost. There are two methods of creating a group post. One or both of them can be enabled during the setup procedure.

1. Public mentions of group members are boosted if they mention the group's name in the first post.

2. fedigroup.py can also look for direct messages from following members. If the group is @mentioned at the very beginning, The message will be reposted as a new public toot originating directly from the group account. The status text as well as media files are included. The originating user will not be shown publicly. (It can still be seen by all group and instance administrators tough!)

But how to simply use it?

1. Subscribe to group account and write a message that should be boosted by the group: EXAMPLE: "OHAI! just found that @mastodon thingie!"

2. Make sure if group account is following you and write a message that should appear as a new post from the group: Put "@group_name" at the very beginning of a direct/private message. EXAMPLE: "@mastodon HERE BE THE MESSAGE TEXT"

How to set up?

The easiest way to install fedigroup.py is via PyPI, the Python Package Index. Use pip3 install fedigroup.py to install it as well as all its dependencies.

It is also possible to download the script manually from the GitHub repository at https://github.com/uanet-exception/fedigroup.py" In that case the necessary dependencies have to be provided too:

fedigroup.py requires https://github.com/halcy/Mastodon.py to run. Install it via your operating system's package manager, pip or even manually.

fedigroup.py will guide you through setup by asking all information it needs when you run it from the commandline for the first time. Being somewhat comfortable with Python scripting and the commandline in general might help if difficulties should appear.

1. You need an account on any Mastodon instance/server that will act as your group account. Think about if you should mark it as a "Bot".

2. Run fedigroup.py create <your-bots-name-here> from the command line.

3. fedigroup.py will ask you for all needed setup data and try to get them right by connecting to the Mastodon server. If it cannot do so, it will tell you and you can retry. When successful, fedigroup.py will write the configuration to its fedigroups.ini file and read it from there next time you run the script.

   The place for storing configuration by default is next to fedigroup.py and will be shown during the first-run/setup phase. You can specify your own path to config file using argument -c/--config.

4. If you want to set up fedigroup.py for more than one group, you can run it again while specifying the group bot name.

5. Test the funcionality by sending direct messages and "@mentions" to your group while running fedigroup.py run <your-bots-name-here> manually. See if things work as expected. If everything works, run the script via supervisor or systemd unit.

6. Use "-h" or "--help" for more information about all available options