Daily Rucks

Project Description

ActivityPub is a W3C standardized protocol for interoperable social networks used by Mastodon and others. It allows social platforms on the web to share posts and other content, as well as related reactions such as likes and recommendations, between them, so the users on participating platforms can have an interconnected social experience.

Daily Rucks is a single-actor ActivityPub server based on Python/Flask that makes a post with a media attachment every day. It is followable from anywhere on the fediverse (or so I hope) and it aggregates “like” and “boost” data for display on its website. Its daily post content is a voice line from the game Bastion (2011), which I cut from the data files, edited with a bit of the game’s soundtrack, and placed in a collection for a random daily choice. And because when I build something like this, I feel compelled to make it the best it can be, there is a custom-designed website for the bot and two month-long special events planned throughout the year. If you too enjoy Logan Cunningham’s voice acting as the character Rucks, I hope you’ll give the bot a follow!

There is more to it than just pure passion for a game though. My primary goal for this project was to build up my own understanding of ActivityPub and its use in the wild, with the long-term aim of incorporating AP connectivity into projects such as FediRoster. That’s why I decided to take the baby steps I’d made with Pinhole and build an ActivityPub service that can actually reliably federate with most of the popular platforms and can handle incoming data.