Secure fetch (aka authorised fetches, authenticated fetches, secure mode...) is *not* supported by pleroma-ebooks, and will fail to download any posts from users on instances with secure fetch enabled. For more information, see [this wiki page](https://github.com/Lynnesbian/mstdn-ebooks/wiki/Secure-fetch).
*Note: Bots are only supported on Mastodon and Pleroma instances. Bots can learn from users on other instances, but the bot itself must run on either a Mastodon or Pleroma instance.*
pleroma-ebooks uses ActivityPub to download posts. This means that it is not dependant on any particular server software, and should work with anything that (properly) implements ActivityPub. Any software that does not support ActivityPub (e.g. diaspora*) is not supported, and won't work.
I recommend that you create your bot's account on a Mastodon instance. Creating a bot on a Pleroma instance means that your bot will be unable to reply, although posting will work just fine. However, even if your bot is on a Mastodon instance, it will be able to learn from any Pleroma or Misskey users just fine.
Configuring pleroma-ebooks is accomplished by editing `config.json`. If you want to use a different file for configuration, specify it with the `--cfg` argument. For example, if you want to use `/home/lynne/c.json` instead, you would run `python3 fetch_posts.py --cfg /home/lynne/c.json` instead of just `python3 fetch_posts.py`
| site | https://botsin.space | The instance your bot will log in to and post from. This must start with `https://` or `http://` (preferably the latter) |
| mention_handling | 1 | 0: Never use mentions. 1: Only generate fake mentions in the middle of posts, never at the start. 2: Use mentions as normal (old behaviour). |
| max_thread_length | 15 | The maximum number of bot posts in a thread before it stops replying. A thread can be 10 or 10000 posts long, but the bot will stop after it has posted `max_thread_length` times. |
| strip_paired_punctuation | false | If true, pleroma-ebooks will remove punctuation that commonly appears in pairs, like " and (). This avoids the issue of posts that open a bracket (or quote) without closing it. |
| limit_length | false | If true, the sentence length will be random between `length_lower_limit` and `length_upper_limit` |
| length_lower_limit | 5 | The lower bound in the random number range above. Only matters if `limit_length` is true. |
| length_upper_limit | 50 | The upper bound in the random number range above. Can be the same as `length_lower_limit` to disable randomness. Only matters if `limit_length` is true. |
| overlap_ratio_enabled | false | If true, checks the output's similarity to the original posts. |
| overlap_ratio | 0.7 | The ratio that determins if the output is too similar to original or not. With decreasing ratio, both the interestingness of the output and the likelihood of failing to create output increases. Only matters if `overlap_ratio_enabled` is true. |
This is released under the EUPL 1.2 license, and based on Lynnesbian's fork which is under the MPL 2.0 license. See LICENSE-EUPL and LICENSE-MPL for details.
**This means you must publish the source code of any ebooks bot you make with this.** A link back to this repository on your bot's profile page or profile metadata will suffice. If you make changes to the code you need to link to your fork/repo instead
