I have recently passed two big milestones with my work around creative online bots.
Last year marked 10 years since I created my first Twitter bot, modeled after the Bartleby, the Scrivener short story. That was also the start of Botwiki, a catalog of artistic, entertaining, and occasionally useful online bots, and a collection of tutorials and other resources for making them.
And earlier this year, the number of unique followers of all of the dozens of bots I run surpassed ten thousand.
Nice, there are now officially 10,000 people following these bots.
Very humbling to create something so many of you are enjoying! Thank you all!
— Stefan Bohacek (@stefan@stefanbohacek.online) 2026-01-29T14:05:25.914Z
I will admit, both milestones kind of crept up on me. Between the heyday of creative bots having passed some time ago (and it being a niche to begin with), and, well, everything going on right now, I think it’s pretty understandable. Still. I would like to make a note of these achievements, and take the time to thank everyone who has enjoyed my work over the years, and motivated me to keep at it.
And also to answer a question: What is it like to run a mildly popular friendly bot network?
In one word: rewarding.
While I don’t care about the number of followers per se, I do like knowing people enjoy them. Seeing people share their favorite views from the South Pole, musing on what random blob shapes remind them, being surprised how deep the roots of some plants go. It’s nice! It’s wholesome. It’s rewarding.
The occasional mention in press doesn’t hurt either!
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 2023, Rolling Stone
But at the end of the day, for me it’s about making something people enjoy and appreciate. And I do want to take this opportunity to encourage others to share the things they care about and that interest them with others. It may seem small and unimportant. But it might just make someone’s day.
And that will make it worth it. I promise!
You can follow my bots in the fediverse and on Bluesky.