THE REGEX KING
jeff sisson's blog (email me)
"it's really coming down out there" bot update
The Big Boy Weather station records data forever: observations for temperature, humidity, rainfall, and wind speed, are all recorded with the original time of observation. These observations are then rolled up into an almanac view, where it’s possible to note exceptional weather events within a day, or a month, or a year.
A timeless way to mark exceptional amounts of rainfall is to say “it’s really coming down out there”. I was first tuned into this phrase via a 2010’s-era Providence-adjacent Twitter riff, and immediately wanted to make a Twitter bot that could say “it’s really coming down out there” whenever it was raining really hard here. I made a bot that did exactly that, tweeting “it’s really coming down out there” whenever the rain rate exceeds 0.33 inches/minute, which is a lot of rain in Queens, NY, where Big Boy Weather is located.
No usernames, no passwords
When the ownership of Twitter changed hands in 2022, bots like these were some of the first casualties: unless you forked over lots of cash, Twitter no longer wanted you to use its API’s. This was a loss, for sure, but depending on an API for a project like this had already started to feel precarious to me. Even outside of Twitter, I’d begun dread all of the paraphernalia involved in “Create an Account”-type businesses with public API’s: you have to run the gauntlet of dealing with the username, the password, the 2 factor authentication, the terms of service checkboxes, the OAuth2 credentials, the marketing email opt-outs, the rate limiting, the ticketed support interface, the API documentation… Some of this is just what it’s like to use the internet now, where doing anything requires an account. But it shouldn’t have to be this way! And relying on someone else’s API for this type of project in particular started to feel faintly embarrassing to me, sort of like broadcasting to the world: “this project will molder and fall apart some day.”
So I took the moment of Twitter exodus as a hiatus from writing software that relied on corporate API’s like these, generally. But as some the Twitter alternatives developed in the shadow of Twitter’s implosion, I started paying particular attention to BlueSky and its AT Protocol federated protocol: some of the people involved had previously contributed to an earlier era of p2p protocols like Dat and Scuttlebutt, networking protocols whose orientation towards custody of data aligned with my own. And when it became clear that most my own Twitter sphere had chosen to move to BlueSky and setup house there, I decided to try to see what it’d look like to revive the “it’s really coming down out there” bot on a protocol that didn’t demand all of the trappings of a “Create an Account” worldview.
Rebuilding the bot on ATProto
On BlueSky, you publish tweets yourself by hosting the data in a format described by the ATProtocol, from your own server. This service is called a Personal Data Store (PDS). Setting up a PDS requires some comfort with operating a server generally, but isn’t so hard…you:
- Run a bash script to configure and run a Dockerized node.js implementation of the PDS part of the protocol
- Run a command line command to create a ATProto/BlueSky account locally:
sudo pdsadmin create-invite-code - Run a command line command to request that the main BlueSky network “crawl” your PDS:
sudo pdsadmin request-crawl
…at which point you have an ATProto/BlueSky account that’s 100% local to your server, but crawled and follow-able by the broader network of people on BlueSky. The only account hosted on my PDS is the weather.bigboy.us bot account, which the Big Boy Weather station now posts to whenever “it’s really coming down out there”.
Connecting this bot to the BlueSky network is no guarantee that the network or company that currently hosts it will be available forever; BlueSky is a venture capital funded company, with an unclear path to profitability. But it’s comforting to know that this bot can keep posting “it’s really coming down out there” on my server forever, with the data living on even if the broader network shuts down.