Blog 📖

Here are my tutorials (here’s a bit about my approach), project updates, and various other articles, including the ongoing Fediverse Explorations series.

I also contribute to the Botwiki blog with articles, tutorials, and interviews.

You can follow me on Mastodon, GitHub, and SoundCloud. And if you find any of my work useful, see here for ways to support it.

Stefan Bohacek has been working for years to enable almost anyone to create simple, automated bots, offering up everything from a constantly-updated view of the weather at the South Pole to one that posts excerpts from the City of New York’s archives of civic data (here’s a map of every Latin cultural organization in the city!) to ones that post obscure and delightful images from the collections of museums around the world.

The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again — December 30, 2023, Rolling Stone

My side projects Press coverage Support my work

A stylized illustration of a person sitting in a chair, reading a book, with a stack of books on the floor near the chair.
World Blog Day 2024 article

📅 a day ago

A tinted screenshot of the Trunk and Tidbits Mastodon blog as it appeared in August 2024. Below the Mastodon logo (the word “mastodon” written in a friendly-looking, lowercase font, with a simplified illustration of an elephant-like mastodon partially covered by the letter “m”) is the tagline “Updates from the Mastodon team”. Further below is a grid of the four posts that have been published so far, with a thumbnail, title, and a brief description for each of the articles.
Trunk & Tidbits Mastodon blog article

Getting recognition from Mastodon's team.

📅 19 days ago

Three proposed fediverse logos: – an older version of the current fediverse logo, five filled-in circles aranged in a pentagon shape, with each circle connected to each other, forming a pentagram-like shape, surrounded by a circle and two wreaths on the side – the “Federation era” logo that replaces the pentagram from the first logo with random squiggles to represent “the chaotic nature of the fediverse”; the design of the wreaths is simplified – a “classic” fediverse logo, a variation on the first design with the “pentagram” slightly tilted to one side and with the circle and wreaths removed.
The history of the fediverse logo article

"A lot of people think that the pentacle was chosen because of its occult or satanic connotations."

📅 a month ago

A tinted screenshot of a portion of a Mastodon profile page showing a list of four links, three of which are verified.
Verification in the fediverse article

Analysis of the link verification feature in the fediverse.

📅 a month ago

A scatter chart showing several popular fediverse servers laid out on a grid, with x axis representing number of registered users, and y axis representing the number of custom emoji on each server. The data point for mstdn.social is highlighted showing the corresponding data and a prompt to click the data point to browse the emoji.
Custom fediverse emoji article

A look at custom emoji used across the fediverse.

📅 2 months ago

A simplified, stylized illustration of a person viwed from a side, sleep-walking, with their eyes closed, arms raised, and back arched backwards in an exaggerated way. Floating around the person are a few geometric shapes.
People-powered technology article

People over (lying) machines.

📅 2 months ago

A pair of two charts: a bar chart showing number of boosts per account for the top 100 most boosted accounts, and a bar pie chart showing the breakdown of original and boosted posts, heavily skewed towards boost.
Lisa Melton: The fediverse's own algorithm article

What it takes to power fediverse's curation system.

📅 3 months ago

A graph chart with nodes representing different fediverse servers. The servers that are the focus of this study are shown in size based on the total number of users on instances blocking each server.
Fediverse domain blocks article

Exploring fediverse domain blocks, an important tool that keeps the fediverse safe.

📅 3 months ago

A tinted screenshot of a bar chart with three columns, with the bottom of each column shaded a darker color.
Which top sites block AI crawlers? article

Not many want their content turned into "slop".

📅 3 months ago

A sketchy drawing of a person carrying a large flower pot with a leafy plant inside it.
How to be a good fediverse citizen article

A short guide for folks interested in making apps, tools, and other projects with and for the fediverse.

📅 3 months ago

A color-tinted screenshot of a scatter chart showing the distribution of fediverse posts from April 23, 2023 to June 10, 2024 based on the number of likes. Most of the data is clustered in the 0 to 1,000 likes range, with a few posts in the 2,000 to 3,000 likes range, and even fewer above that. 5 posts are in the top 5,000 to 6,000 range, most of those posted in July 2023.
Most popular fediverse posts: June 6, 2024 Edition article

Searching for popular posts on federated social media.

📅 3 months ago

A color-tinted collage of a very long bar chart that was cut up to make each section with its title visible.
Fediverse activity report #1 article

Is the activity in the fediverse slowing down? Maybe a little!

📅 3 months ago

A tinted screenshot of a portion of the dataset rendered as a table, with one of the rows filled with bar charts representing data in the given column.
Impact of fediverse clients on the use of alt text article

Analyzing the ways fediverse apps handle image descriptions.

📅 4 months ago

A tinted screenshot of my Mastodon poll: The web can be such a small world sometimes. Has this ever happened to you? You look up an answer to a question you have, or come across someone’s fun side project, look at the author, and — hey, that’s a friend of mine! 59%: Oh yeah! 41%: Hm, not really
Poll: The web can be such a small world sometimes article

I know that person!

📅 4 months ago

A tinted screenshot of a poll from the article.
Data on sending a post into the fediverse article

How long does it take a fediverse post to reach its audience?

📅 4 months ago

A tinted screenshot showing results of the main poll from the article on the various ways people fund their fediverse communities.
The ways we keep the fediverse sustainable article

Go buy some stickers and plushies!

📅 4 months ago

A tinted screenshot of a grayscale globe with a few hundred pins showing locations of various UNESCO World Heritage Sites across the world. One of the pins has a popup open above it with the name of the location: “Djoudj National Bird Sanctuary, protected area” and a link to “Learn more”.
Making a map of UNESCO World Heritage Sites article

Learn the basics of working with Wikidata and Mapbox.

📅 4 months ago

How many fediverse servers know about my server? article

How federated is my fediverse server?

📅 4 months ago

A tinted collage of overlapping header images from other articles I wrote: A chart comparing worker strike activity to the US federal minimum wage, a tweet from a bot posting protest art, and a random website trying to hotlink images from my site, showing a Black Lives Matter logo instead.
Progressive tutorials article

Radicalized by async/await.

📅 4 months ago

Why I made Alt Text Hall of Fame article

Not because it's easy, but because it should be easy.

📅 4 months ago

Close

Ad-blocker not detected

Consider installing a browser extension that blocks ads and other malicious scripts in your browser to protect your privacy and security. Learn more.