Heyo, @vappster@wetdry.world speaking! My original idea was to write one big toot about this bot as soon as it would've reached its next milestone, however, I recognize it's taking a while, so here we go

Even if it may not be apparent at a first glance, there's been a fair amount of work done to it behind the scenes. Keep in mind it’s a fully custom bot (written using the Botkit by Fedify framework) as I am both taking it as a learning experience to better understand how ActivityPub + the Fediverse works and, potentially, as a base for other bots I'd like to host in the future. It's also self-hosted on repurposed, low-powered hardware as a way to reuse something that would otherwise end up in a landfill and to also keep running costs down.

Here's a brief summary of all the changes and improvements:

- The bot has been updated to the latest development version of BotKit, which allows you to follow it directly from its webpage as well as other misc improvements (...and it also introduced breaking changes, but that's been taken care of)

- Sometimes the bot would fail to start after regularly scheduled downtime and, as this happened late at night in my local time and I'd have to restart it manually, it would result in several missing posts. This was due to a kinda hard to find issue with its init system, but it's now been resolved

- In order to keep file sizes in check and to avoid crashes in case things get too out of control, old posts (>1 month) are now automatically deleted

- The blacklist has been refactored: it could just take general tags before, while now it also accepts individual post IDs, making it easier to filter away bad content

- Mod tools were basically non-existent before. If something problematic got posted, I'd have to find the post, delete it manually and restart the bot. This is no longer the case, so I can take care of things much more quickly and efficiently

- Work has also been done to add more SFW sources to the bot