Crossposting to Mastodon

I have a Mastodon account @Stark9837@techhub.social and my community there requested a bot to cross post from here to Mastodon, because it is easier to keep track of everything. The bot account is @Python@techhub.social.

The bot is 100% written in Python 3.12 and really a testing in production product. I as creator just want to make 100% sure this is allowed.

The post features the author, tag, topic, and link. People are enjoying it. Please let me know If I may do this or whether I should take it down.

Here is an example:

Source code is also available to anyone at:

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It’s public data, so I don’t see any issue with you mirroring the content to Mastodon with a link back to the original post.

The terms of service for this site are at Terms of Service - Discussions on Python.org. I don’t see anything that would prevent you from doing this.

FWICS Discourse has an ActivityPub plugin. Perhaps the admins could consider enabling that so that Python’s Discourse would become part of Fediverse without having to resort to proxies/bots.

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It’s definitely an interesting idea! It looks like each category you publish becomes a username, making discuss.python.org itself an ActivityPub server. I personally would be fine with this.

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The one thing I’m hesitant about is moderation. People post some pretty strong opinions/language on social media, especially about topics that come up in these forums, and it’s not possible to moderate ActivityPub replies the way we can moderate forum activity. If this is presented as an “official source”, how do we treat it as a space under our CoC and moderation practices?

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From the plug-in description:

Currently, the plugin will publish a “Note” from the first post of a new topic in a category where ActivityPub is enabled. Currently, replies to the post on Discourse are not published, and replies to the “Note” on other ActivityPub services are not imported into Discourse.

So I don’t think there’s any need to be concerned about Mastodon/ActivityPub messages flowing into here.

1 Like