Since I was ~10 or 11 I have access to the internet. At early stage it was thru internet cafe, then very slow DSL and … then world somehow managed to push me into “always online” state where even my watch has its own eSIM and internet connection. So where are we now at the story my friend?
Oh yes, at the begining I was using IRC and ICQ, then we had in Poland also GG communicator which make all ICQs looking like an grandmas chat. But I still was using IRC and other stuff like XMPP at some point, and then we had some friends on XMPP by Google (aka talk/chat/hangouts/whatever) or XMPP by O2 (Tlen) and some other ones.
And in modern era I am talking with people using Meta stuff – Messenger (and a while ago it was also instagram), SMS, Signal and … email. Thats all.
But I have a problem – Signal doesnt have any nice API for bots. And I Love bots. I truly love to have a chatbot in my pocket that will answer to my silly needs. Really. Because its faster and less distracting then any other way of getting these answers.
Examples – checking current weather with a short forecast – I have an instant text answer. No icons, no emoji, no graphics, no maps… etc. Simple action. My second best friend is adding new source to RSS reader -> just write RSS https…feedurl.something… and its in my freshRSS. Simple and fast. And mobile friendly 😉
I have also notifications from my two fav youtube channels, and i can share a quick text that lands here -> in ghost, as a draft. So I dont loose my ideas for later. Ofc most of them is not for new blogpost, but just notes with some quasi-important stuff that I dont want to loose. But it works for me.
And It was tough experience of creating that bot. It will be some day on some OSS friendly git hosting. But didnt decided yet which one is enough OSS friendly for me. But I am using signal-cli with signal-cli-rest-api addon and my bot is written using least FOSS of all FOSS software 😉 – C#+.Net because Its my hammer that see everything as a nail.
But it is a very powerful hammer that can use a lot of stuff as a nail. Even people that laughs from me can be a nail… 😉
Oh yes but I have been talking about bots.
Thas stuff that I hate in Signal. Why the fuck I cannot just register a BOT account without a mobile, that would be hardcore marked as BOT in all signal conversations and so on… Instead I had to buy a SIM card or eSim or rent a number online… just to have this one service working. Its so stupid… but hey – its popular so I have it on my phone anyway.
It is still much cheaper to once buy a sim card in Poland (~1,2€ for few days, and after you register number in signal and make it PIN safe + remember to login in regular manner its safe) then use SMS bot ;-). I am trying to get rid of Messenger so it was a no-go. And E-mail itself is a distractor for me. Distractor that have its own BOT gate in my ToDo list.
And yes – I was considering telegram, irc, xmpp and other “easy to implement” bots but it would be another communicator app on my mobile that I would like to NOT have.
So for now I am dealing with c# signal app and thinking which git hosting is last on my own git suck list content. As each of them is not a good place to be.