Improved notification handling

[e-dreyer]

Problem

The Mastodon API had a great feature, which implements a push notification service. This not only allows apps to easily implement push notifications but also for ways of tracking new notifications in extended APIs.

It is this core functionality that is used in MastoBot to allow for the detection of new mentions, favorites, follows, etc.

This, however, comes at a cost. If this feature is used to track notifications. These notifications should either be dismissed on the API level or they should be written to some local database to allow for the tracking and persistence of the bot's state.

In early versions of MastoBot, sqlite, mysql, firebase and redis was used to do this, but had since been removed in order to keep the overall design generic and Docker setup minimalistic.

This, however, leads to a problem with mentions of the bot. Mentions can be used to simulate a group, similar to MastoBot-3D. In doing so, notifications of mentions are dismissed in order to perform certain behaviors.

If users, however, mention the bot, the creators and owners of said bot will be unable to track notifications in most apps and in the Mastodon web UI.

A method needs to be implemented to either forward certain mentions which only mention the bot, thus it is directed at the bot and its team or other criteria, to the team or allow the teacking of such notifications.

As the usage of MastoBot-3D has evolved from a simple boosting bot to an actual community and posts are being made by the MastoBot-3D team, users are directing questions to the team and these posts are being missed. The only current solution is to implement this functionality in MastoBot-3D or have users mention the admins directly.

This is a core functionality and is generic enough that it should be part of MastoBot

[e-dreyer]

Implementing a data storage system would be ideal, but sticking to the generic philosophy of MastoBot would be difficult. The best would be to implement abstract functions to add and remove values to some data storage implemented by the user.

But then again, using a simple json or Redis store would use key:value pairs, where sqlite or SQL implementation would require queries. I am not sure how to keep this as generic as possible.

[e-dreyer]

Implementing a data storage system would be ideal, but sticking to the generic philosophy of MastoBot would be difficult. The best would be to implement abstract functions to add and remove values to some data storage implemented by the user.

But then again, using a simple json or Redis store would use key:value pairs, where sqlite or SQL implementation would require queries. I am not sure how to keep this as generic as possible.

Be me 3 hours later and thinking back to this

Bruh, do you even ORM?

[e-dreyer]

One thing we could do to simply forward all messages is only mentioning the bot and not parent posts to moderators.

Thus, replies will be forwarded, but replies to replies won't. Knowing whether a post is simply a reply to the poster or community and actual posts directed to the bot will be difficult.