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A black and white photo from a meetup. I am sitting with two other people next to the speaker, across from a small crowd.

Press quotes and coverage

Below is a list of articles, blog posts, and announcements where I was quoted, or my work has been discussed or mentioned.

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 — Rolling Stone, December 2023

On Glitch, I found Twitterbot code by web developer Stefan Bohacek. In barely an hour I remixed it into a bot that tweeted haiku-like poems based on lines from poets like Sappho and Basho (“have i been here before? / i can almost hear your song / o planets”). Surprised by how easy it was, I started remixing videogames and chat apps. After a couple of days, I realized that, whoa, I was beginning to absorb the logic of Node.

It’s Time to Make Code More Tinker-Friendly — WIRED, May 2017

Stefan is the creator of Botwiki, an open catalog of friendly, useful and artistic online bots, tools and tutorials.

Alongside fellow admin, Veronica Belmont, Stefan and co have worked tirelessly for the past year and a half on the site that’s dedicated to teaching folks how to make friendly, whimsical, and (by his own admission) “sometimes mildly annoying”, online bots.

Creator Spotlight: Building Twitter Bots with Stefan Bohacek — Glitch, May 2017

@stefan is clearly not only focused on the technical aspects of bots on social networks though: “I am really excited about being part of something new and positive that we can all help grow together. Between the scams of the profit-oriented “web3” and the continued automation of jobs that the working class will hardly benefit from, there really hasn’t been much to get excited about in the tech world. So this is a very welcome change, and I am happy to be part of it.”

Last Week in the Fediverse — The Fediverse Report, February 2023

"If you have a favorite Mastodon bot or started learning to create your own, there’s a pretty good chance that @stefan was somehow involved in the journey. Through creating bots and the project jointhefediverse.net, Stefan’s impact on the Fediverse and Glitch cannot be understated!"

Huge thanks to @jenn, @anildash , and the rest of the @glitchdotcom team for the wonderful community they've helped create!

And congratulations to everyone on this list!

blog.glitch.com/post/last-year

— Stefan Bohacek (@[email protected])2024-01-24T00:23:30.617Z

NPR calling me and @[email protected] "bot watchers […] bemoan[ing] the imminent demise of creations they loved".

Fair enough.

npr.org/2023/02/09/1155543369/

— Stefan Bohacek (@[email protected])2023-02-09T15:34:24.312Z

Oh wow.

Not only @Mastodon started a new series of "updates from the core Mastodon engineering team", they featured one of my articles.

blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/05/

Neat!

— Stefan Bohacek (@[email protected])2024-05-07T17:02:58.846Z

More from Mastodon’s Blog

Really enjoyed speaking with @caos for @[email protected] about my project jointhefediverse.net!

"I'd just like to add that it's been a few years since I got excited about innovation in tech. Things like cryptocurrency, NFTs, and now AI, have all been about extracting value and making profit. The fediverse is a breath of fresh air."

The full article, in German: gnulinux.ch/jointhefediverse-n

— Stefan Bohacek (@[email protected])2023-06-30T13:35:30.263Z

Botwiki came about because Bohacek wanted to be able to run fast searches whenever he had an idea for a bot. As he explains, similar websites that already existed “were either a bit incomplete, hard to browse, or plainly just didn’t work most of the time.”

A Wiki for All the Internet’s Bots — hyperallergic.com, March 2016

Stefan Bohacek decided he would catalog every bot on the web.

It’s no small task and he’s far from done. At his site, botwiki.org, you can search bots by category, by platform, or if you’re a dev and you want to learn how to make a bot, you can search by language or the text or data you want to use.

Find any bot ever with this awesome online encyclopedia — technical.ly, March 2016

Botmakers.org provides a list of tools and resources for developers to create ethical bots, and the organization has a Code of Conduct that applies to all bots its more than 700 members create.

Stefan Bohacek, Botmakers’s organizer, said reaching outside of your usual social and professional circles to other groups can give you a different perspective and help you realize features your bot might need for harassment prevention.

Why Microsoft believes that AI bots are the only logical path forward — dailydot.com, March 2016

Developed by BotWiki, The Monthly Bot Challenge started as a community event with a simple concept: on the first day of each month, a new challenge topic – and prize – is announced online.

BotWiki / Monthly Bot Challenge — andfestival.org.uk, March 2016

If Stefan’s name sounds familiar, we profiled him 6 years ago (essentially, a million in web years) about creating Twitter Bots. Obviously a lot has changed since then (we got TikTok, a global pandemic happened, we lost Twitter) aside from Stefan’s passion for creating bots. We caught up with him to chat about the recent AI hype and the future of bots on the web.

5 Minutes with Stefan Bohacek, bot builder — Glitch, May 2023

“Many Mastodon developers use Glitch, a free online web app builder, to run their bots. For example, Stefan Bohacek, a bot developer who also runs the resource site Botwiki, has a collection of 54 active Mastodon bots running on Glitch. However, there are alternative ways to create a bot, such as via a Python app or using GitHub Actions.”

Developers: Mastodon and Bluesky Want Your Twitter Bots — thenewstack.io, November 2024

“The online platform botwiki.org documents that bots can also break up hardened discussions in comment columns and make people laugh . […] The source codes for some of the more than 2,000 bots listed are freely available, so you can use them for your own projects”

„@BOT123 GEFÄLLT DAS“ – WAS STECKT HINTER (SOCIAL) BOTS? — mediakompetent.de, January 2024

Le site botwiki.org a commencé à les cataloguer, en plus d’offrir des tutoriaux pour en créer et plein d’informations, et comme Twitter est un des réseaux les plus accueillants je vous ai fait une petite sélection de mes préférés :

Le monde fantastique des bots sur Twitter — laboiteverte.fr, March 2016

stefans-creative-bots.glitch.me: "a fun collection of digital projects, but also a pleasant reminder of how (relatively) easy it is to spin up something small and frivolous that makes the web a marginally-nicer place than it would otherwise be"

Shout out to @glitchdotcom for making it "(relatively) easy" to run projects like this!

— Stefan Bohacek (@[email protected])2024-08-30T13:19:59.962Z