About motorsports twitter accounts mirror bots.
🇫🇷 Version française plus bas ⏬
When I opened the Mastodon Racing instance, I created several bots reproducing the official tweets from the motorsport world.
The main goal was to stimulate discussion around the latest motorsports news by allowing people to comment directly from their mastodon account.
Although these bots were followed by several hundred accounts, they never encouraged discussion.
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The format is not good for this, if only because it is not possible to see directly if someone answered a toot from the timeline. First you have to unfold the toot, which is annoying when there are so many.
Then came the instability problems, the scripts that stop for no reason or saturate the timeline with the same tweet loop.
After testing various solutions without finding a satisfying one, I decided to stop the bots.
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I think it's better to promote fediverse-specific content than to reproduce twitter-based content. I do not intend to spend more time on this issue and rather devote myself to improving the reliability and stability of the instance, among other things via its migration to a more powerful server (more information soon).
In the longer term I would like to put in place a bot that replays when it identifies a hashtag related to motorsport.
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I'm not opposed to returning some twitter account bots if there is an audience for and instance can host bots maintained by others than myself.
Share your views by responding to this toot.
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@RaceControl I thought the bots for the main series were quite useful a) to not have to go on Twitter to keep up with them and b) because toots by bots could initiate discussion. Having said that I agree that a disadvantage of #Mastodon is that it doesn't show the number of answers to a toot directly and that stability of the instance is more importan than having the bots active. I'd still like to see them back once there is headroom in terms of performance & time to manage them.
