Jun 03, 2021

1 - Telegram Bot Overview

by: CJ Pais

Game04 post 01/10

Meta:

• Written:
  • Where: Multiple Places (Chiaki's House, Swamis Cafe)
  • When: Over a few days (which ones?)
• Type:
  • Text Document
  • Writeup
  • Project Overview
• Written
  • (what times did I do this?)
  • Wednesday June 2
    • METADATA SHOULD BE TRANSCLUDED. (the times/places i worked on)
  • Thursday June 3
    • METADATA SHOULD BE TRANSCLUDED
  • Friday June 4
    • METADATA SHOULD BE TRANSCLUDED

Overview

A fast way to ingest content into BUZZARD via Telegram

Concept

Take every message sent to a Telegram Channel and post it on BUZZARD.

Background

Meta: (note multiple metadata in a single doc, as this could be split)

• Idea Spawned
  • Where: Elysian Park
  • When: Thursday May 20th (~3:30pm?)
  • Who: Dave, Kristen, CJ
• Written
  • (what times did I do this?)
  • Wednesday June 2
    • METADATA SHOULD BE TRANSCLUDED. (the times/places i worked on)
  • Thursday June 3
    • METADATA SHOULD BE TRANSCLUDED

We were discussing what could be a long term game. Something like a content consumption feed for each person in the BUZZARD collective. This could allow for some more information serendipity rather than information asymmetry. If some piece of information is interesting to one person it could be interesting to other friends in the group. It could create a more natural discovery mechanism for information and also creating a shared context in an async fashion, with less "social pressure" to respond/read/etc.

Something like this could exist with no notifications and something looking similar to an RSS feed. Where it is easy for each person to skim what everyone else is reading. When something catches the eye, it is easy to immediately consume. This could be a more async way to keep up "ambiently" and might build closeness asynchronously? At the very least keeping up some level of shared context.

Also related to Kristen's writeup on Friendship Games. This is some "ambient" friendship.

Note on ambient friendship too - silence is really important, but presence can have some ambience to it.

Design Goals

I think the motivation is heavily inspired by the conversation between Kristen, Dave, and myself. An easy, low friction way to ingest content consumption information into BUZZARD that any one of us could use. In addition I chose to add "random thoughts" that may not be direct content.

(Often times some random idea is spawned that is hard to attribute precisely. Hopefully moving forward this can be slightly alleviated.)

Implementation

(Send a message to Telegram Channel -> Post on BUZZARD)

Given this constraint, one easy way to get information in would be to send a link to a Telegram channel and have this appear on the site. This seemed like a simple enough way to get basic information onto the site. Specifically the "share" menu is implemented in most apps, so the normal flow is "share -> telegram -> channel" from the user side to get information onto the site.

v0 Features

• Sending a message to TG Channel will go to the BUZZARD git & website
• Replying to a message in the TG Channel will append to an existing file
• TODO (incomplete but partial implementation):
  • Including the title of a webpage and the URL directly for easy consumption

NAMES

CALLING FOR A PROJECT NAME. TRYING TO STICK WITH BUZZARD THEME

• INGEST
• PLUCK
• DEVOUR
• GOBBLE
• GUZZLE
• SCARF
• BUZZBUZZ (bitch)

Future

• How to name files and add context automatically from the bot in a useful way
• Would a group chat with the bot make more sense?
  • Handling multiple people's responses and including their authorship
    • I think this will be important and useful
• RSS feeds generated from this as well.
  • Could be done in 11ty or from the bot directly - 11ty would be more clean I think
• Refine setup process (make it easier)
  • Could directly have a convo with the bot which just posts instead of a channel, this removes setup
• Add /branch command
• Need a test bot as well as a test branch, this way the main bot can always run
• A way to seamlessly add new authors
• A way to add metadata in general
• Move away from Telegram?
  • It feels restrictive to me.
• Need a way to test the code
  • This should be relatively simple
    • (ideally main and test branches treated relatively equally)
• Handle new file types
  • Audio
  • Video
  • Pictures
• Generalize the code and GitHub/Git integration.
  • Basically to more easily use TG as a way to get data into any Git/GitHub repo?
• pls add more

Sidenote:

Should we create a GitHub Organization? This would allow us to put multiple repos in one place, and ideally could help manage access to the repos as well.