Mon blog

If you use the fediverse, you know that the main bot-hosting instance, botsin.space, closed recently. I document here one or two wthings about the new hosting of two bots I maintain, one answering BGP requests and one for DNS information.

These two bots are documented in the articles "A Fediverse/Mastodon bot for DNS" and "A Fediverse/Mastodon bot for BGP queries". They were hosted on a dedicated-for-bots instance, botsin.space. This one is now closed so I had to move elsewhere.

This proved to be surprisingly difficult. Many instances no longer accept new inscriptions, or are subject to a (sometimes long) process of registration. Some have policies against bots (or mention they are just "tolerated", something I did not want) or against the use of some specific vocabulary (and I did not want the DNS bot to filter words used in domain names).

But there were also technical issues. Some instances never hosted a bot (more specifically a read-write bot, which will need the ability to read notifications; many bots are write-only) and therefore have surprising issues (one accepted the connections but never sent the heartbeats that the Mastodon API uses to check liveness, another replied with 404 to all requests of the streaming API). And I had no experience with debugging these issues (but now I do). In the end, while I would have prefer to try another instance, I used the instance where my main acount is hosted, mastodon.gougere.fr.

As usual on the fediverse, no instance is perfect (botsin.space was blocking a big instance, mamot.fr, for instance) but at least this time it works. You can now resume sending DNS and BGP queries.

Thanks to the people who maintain instances (it is often an unrewarding task) and let's toot.