autofollowbot - A python bot script to automatically follow anyone who follows you or votes for your posts

Using the #piston library from @xeroc, I am going to make a very small, easy little python script that automatically, periodically, searches for new followers, and then posts a transaction to make your profile follow them, so they automatically appear in your feed.

The github repo is here, and I am working on this immediately:

https://github.com/l0k1-smirenski/autofollowbot

You can find some of the stuff that led me to this but so you understand without having to search around, I will explain what the motivation is:

Whether your posts get upvoted well or not, is entirely a function of who is following you. By engaging with others, and following them, you see their posts on your feed, allowing you to post comments and vote on their posts and comments. The more visible you become to another person, the greater the chance is they will also promote your posts, as well as vote on your stuff. By making this process of following those who follow you automatic, you reduce the time you have to spend on developing your social network of other users whose interests coincide with yours. This then invokes the possibility of the discovery of mutual needs between people and accelerates the development of projects relating to these common interests.

This is also why I tagged it #steemtherapy because networking with Steem users helps us improve our lives.

Big thanks to @cryptovpn for the suggestion about also following those who vote on your posts, but don't necessarily follow you. Also his suggestion to allow this to operate on more than one account, and cross-follow as well.

This is a feature that could be part of interfaces, and will be integrated into my other, bigger, longer to finish project #steemportal

Edit

I recall seeing some info somewhere about how to poll witness nodes for follower/following data, and I forget where it was. I am going to keep looking, but it appears that this is not currently within the Piston API. So I have to navigate myself through direct RPC query mechanisms to do this. It's not a big project, but there will be a learning curve I have to get through in order to implement it. I am also going to search to make sure someone hasn't already made something that does most of what I want already, in case I can pull that part in and directly add it.