Honkbot (Rust)#

A single Bluesky bot that listens to the full firehose via Jetstream and replies to animal commands with random Flickr images.

Rewrite of bskybots/honkbot in Rust for reliability and performance.

Commands#

Setup#

1. Copy .env.example to .env and fill in your credentials:

   • BSKY_HANDLE — your bot's Bluesky handle
   • BSKY_PASSWORD — an app password for the bot account
   • FLICKR_KEY — a Flickr API key (get one here)

2. Seed fallback images (used when Flickr is down or rate-limited):

   ./seed_fallback_images.sh
   

   This downloads ~12 images per category into fallback_images/. You can also manually add your own .jpg/.png/.webp files.

3. Build and run:

   cargo build --release
   ./target/release/honkbot
   

Features#

• Single binary handles all 13 animal commands
• Jetstream WebSocket for efficient firehose consumption (only receives app.bsky.feed.post events)
• Automatic reconnection with cursor tracking on disconnect
• Bounded concurrency (10 concurrent reply tasks) to avoid flooding APIs
• Session refresh with automatic retry on auth failures
• Flickr fallback images — if Flickr is down or rate-limited, picks a random image from fallback_images/<command>/
• Image resizing for images over 1MB (Bluesky blob limit)
• Structured logging via tracing (set RUST_LOG=debug for verbose output)

Architecture#

Jetstream (WSS) → match post text against triggers → spawn bounded task:
  1. Search Flickr for random animal image
  2. Download & resize if needed
  3. Upload blob to Bluesky
  4. Create reply post with image