Clock bots

Inspiration behind Clock Bots

Many years ago, I stumbled upon the Twitter account @big_ben_clock. This account's premise is simple, every hour, it will tweet "BONG" equal to the hour; emulating the clock striking an hour and ringing bells in real life.

I don't live in London, so I ended up creating a similar Twitter account for the clock tower I my community college, Hudson Valley Community College. Its Twitter account is @HVCC_Clock.

Recently, I discovered the power of ActivityPub, the technology that powers Mastodon, PeerTube, and many other sites in the "Fediverse".

I wanted to recreate @HVCC_Clock in Mastodon, and while I could have picked a Mastodon instance to host the bot, I wanted a challenge for myself. So, instead, I recreated it in ActivityPub, so any website in the Fediverse can follow it.

But why stop at just one clock, when I can have multiple? That's when I decided to expand and add more clock bots across multiple time zones.

I hope these clock bots give you some joy in your Fediverse feeds! There's a list of who to follow below!

List of Clock Bots

Simply copy the "Webfinger" column into the search function of your ActivityPub-supported application (such as Mastodon), and you can follow it!

Name	Webfinger	Location	TimeZone
HVCC Clock Tower	@hvcc_clock@activitypub.shendrick.net	Troy, NY, USA	(UTC-05:00) Eastern Time (New York)
RIT Kate Gleason Hall Clock	@rit_clock@activitypub.shendrick.net	Rochester, NY, USA	(UTC-05:00) Eastern Time (New York)