I Finally Found A Use For Google Sheets

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Do you remember on Twitter, back in the golden days, when the worst part of the website were the people who were addicted to finding things they thought were bad about other people, and then creating dunk posts, and dogpiles? Do you miss that? Oh, yeah, me either. But, the old part of Twitter I’m actually talking about here, are the bots that people used to setup, that read from their tweets, and then shot out a randomized post. I think some of them were called like, “John Reads” or “John Books”, wherein they’d put their name and qualify it with something related to writing or reading. Either way, remember that? Do ya?

Well, I recreated that in a bot, that reads from a spreadsheet of your posts, jumbles it, randomizes it, restructures it, and then posts them semi-logically, to Mastodon.

You can see post_gen_bot on Github.

Now, in my use-case for this, I have it reading from Google Sheets I’ve generated as backups of every single post I’ve made to Mastodon since the beginning of 2024, because … I just didn’t know what to do with all of that, until now. But, I’m assuming, if you really wanted to, you could feed your old backed-up tweets from a deleted Twitter account, into this bot, and then have it post jumbled nonsense from your posting-past on social media.

That’d be kinda neat, right?

Now, this is like the 4th or 5th bot I’ve made? I don’t know, I’m losing count already.

But, I have had a little bit of aggression directed toward me via the fediverse. Because, some people just don’t think. They don’t consider what they’re doing, or read what they’re targeting. They don’t particularly care if you’ve spent time making something interesting, or neat, and would simply request that you mute, delete, and ban your work.

To those people, I say, lighten the frikk up. Don’t waste your reports, just use the mute function. I don’t make these things to please other people, or to meet your expectations or specific specifications of what you personally believe the fediverse should be. I do this for me. And if you don’t like that, you don’t have to see it.

It reminds me of years back, on another Mastodon account, where I was posting about Tomb Raider and how cool the iteration of the game I was playing, happened to be, and this … I don’t want to call them “extremely online,” because there was something else wrong with them, entirely, but this person came into my notifications, and they were like, “I don’t care about Tomb Raider, why are you talking about this?”

And I was taken aback, like … There are legitimately people out there who fully and completely believe the entire world, and everyone in it, revolves around them, specifically. And that’s frikken nuts.

I don’t think this is a problem that only exists on Mastodon, though. I think this is wide-spread, across all of social media, and the internet, and it’s only been exasperated by a society that celebrates individualism and isolation, and so on, and so forth. I could go on for hours, but this is a topic for another time.

Either way, for those that like bots, here’s another one for you.