Scrumwave

At some point in the late 2010s there was a moment where Twitter backed away heavily from offering an open Public API, presumably due to heavy spam/abuse issues, but a lot of us who had spent time creating good-natured bots on the platform felt somewhat alienated. I had already gone through the process of porting some of my bots to Mastodon, but in thinking about what I wanted to do in the event that Twitter banned some/all of my bots it occurred to me that Discord had become an increasingly popular platform among people I knew and it offered its own functionality for bot activity via API + webhooks.

I decided to create "Scrumwave", a Discord server that had fairly unusual user permissions setup where people were unable to post text in any channel except for one, the #guestbook channel-- every other channel was just a single timeline for an individual bot from the various generative bots I had made. I described it as an "art gallery" and thought it was an interesting experiment. It wasn't fully retreating into self-hosted web infrastructure, where I felt that people would largely ignore the work, but still lived in its own little "bubble" in a follower's Discord server sidebar, so they could choose to click over and view updates whenever they wanted.

At some point in the last year or two I let most of my bots stop posting, figuring they had been running for long enough. I let the domain that held the page where you could gain access to the Discord server lapse in 2025.