Auto-Twitter-Bluesky-Mastodon-Bots

This is a bot that will automatically post a set of (G)I-DLE pictures once every 8 hours, cross-posted to Twitter/X, Bluesky, and Mastodon.

Twitter Developer Account

• Be sure to have a Twitter developer account ready. Here

• We need Consumer Keys (API Keys, Secret) and Authentication Tokens (Access Token and Secret). Keep them in a safe place and not reveal to others.

• Note (2026): X discontinued the old Free/Basic/Pro tiers in favor of a pay-per-use, credit-based model. Posting a text/media tweet without a URL costs roughly $0.015 per request. For a bot posting a handful of tweets a day, this typically runs a few dollars a month — check your app's Usage analytics page on the developer dashboard to see your actual cost and confirm your app is showing under "Pay Per Use."

Bluesky Account

• Create a Bluesky account, then generate an App Password under Settings → Privacy and Security → App Passwords. Don't use your main login password — the App Password can be revoked independently if it ever leaks.

• Bluesky is currently free to use (with rate limits), no developer approval process required.

Mastodon Account

• Create an account on the Mastodon instance of your choice (e.g. mastodon.social). Note the instance domain — you'll need it as the API base URL.

• Under Preferences → Development, create a New Application. The write scope is enough for posting text + media; you can skip read, profile, and follow if you want to keep permissions minimal.

• This will give you a Client key, Client secret, and an Access Token — only the Access Token is needed for posting.

Dependencies

• Check if you have Node.js and npm installed in your PC node -v and npm -v.

• Node.js v20.10 or newer is required. The Bluesky SDK (@atproto/api) is published as an ESM-only package and uses import ... with { type: 'json' } syntax that older Node versions can't parse — you'll get a cryptic Unexpected token 'with' error if you're on an older version. If you're using nvm, run nvm install --lts and nvm use --lts before installing dependencies.

• Download the necessary components

npm init -y
npm install twitter-api-v2
npm install dotenv
npm install cron
npm install fs
npm install request
npm install sharp
npm install @atproto/api

• Mastodon posting uses Node's built-in fetch/FormData — no extra package needed on Node 18+.

• Create a .env file and replace your values you created on the Twitter developer platform. Note that APP_ID is the first few numbers of ACCESS_TOKEN

NODE_ENV="development"
API_KEY = "XXXXXX"
API_SECRET = "YYYYYY"
ACCESS_TOKEN = "12345-ZZZZ"
ACCESS_SECRET = "WWWWWWW"
BEARER_TOKEN = "AAAAAAA"
APP_ID = "12345"

BSKY_HANDLE = "yourname.bsky.social"
BSKY_APP_PASSWORD = "xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx"

MASTODON_API_URL = "https://mastodon.social"
MASTODON_ACCESS_TOKEN = "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"

• If you don't want to create a Instagram Bot, you don't have to install the following.

npm install instagram-private-api
npm install request-promise
npm install jimp

• Be sure also include the Instagram API key in .env file.

IG_USERNAME="WWWWWWW"
IG_PASSWORD="ZZZZZZ"

• You have to create a .gitignore file to hide these sensitive values from other people. Make sure runtime state files (posting_history.json, postRecord.txt) and the img/ download cache are also ignored — these shouldn't be tracked in version control, since the bot rewrites them constantly and tracking them tends to cause merge conflicts on deploy.

Environment

• I don't want to set up the Twitter bot locally, so I build a Linux environment inside a EC2 instance of AWS (free tier, free for the first year).

• I use pm2 to keep my index.js running. By default, pm2 will keep the process running even after disconnecting from the SSH session. You can download it by typing sudo npm install -g pm2 in the terminal.

• Since GitHub no longer supports password authentication for git operations, set up a Personal Access Token (Settings → Developer settings → Personal access tokens) and run git config --global credential.helper store on the server so git pull/git push don't prompt for credentials every time the deploy script runs.

Limitations and Others

• I still have to manually filter the image and add the image direct link to a JSON file. Updating uris.json and redeploying automatically picks up newly added images — already-posted images are tracked separately and won't repeat.

• I used the free Twitter API v2, so I don't have the access of retweet a post, like a post, search a post etc. As of 2026, X has moved to pay-per-use pricing entirely, so even posting now has a small per-request cost (see above).

• I directly used one Github repository to store my images.

• Due to the small capacity of the remote server, I cannot a build system like Docker to ensure consistency between environments.

• I used the postRecord.txt file to keep track of the images that have been posted. I created a bash script that makes my life easier. Don't forget to make it executable, chmod u+x twitter.sh.

• I used a in-memory set and posting_history.json to ensure all posted images are unique. Once the entire image pool has been posted once, the bot wipes both the in-memory set and postRecord.txt and starts a fresh cycle automatically.

• The bot posts multiple images at once based on a pre-set probability distribution across 4 modes (1–4 images per post).

• Bluesky requires a RichText facet to make #hashtags clickable — just posting plain text with a # in it renders as static text, unlike Twitter and Mastodon which auto-link hashtags server-side.

• Each platform posting call (postToBluesky, postToMastodon) is wrapped in its own try/catch, so if one platform's API has a hiccup, it doesn't take down the whole bot or the other platforms.

• Special occasion posts (member birthdays and group debut anniversary) are handled in birthdayPost.js, which fires daily at KST 00:00. Each event posts a multilingual message with up to 3 randomly selected images from special_uris.json. If no images are available for a given occasion, it falls back to text-only automatically.

• X posts for birthdays/anniversary are text-only to avoid the $0.20/post URL surcharge — cross-platform links are included in Bluesky and Mastodon posts only.

#!/bin/sh

cd Auto-Twitter-Bot
git pull
pm2 restart index

cd img
rm -f ./*

• To add new images to the regular pool, update uris.json and run twitter.sh. To add or update special occasion images (birthdays/anniversary), update special_uris.json in the same way — both files are tracked in git so a single git push + twitter.sh keeps the server in sync.

License

MIT License.