Building the Subspace Bot — Daily Trek, One Post at a Time

Building the Subspace Bot (and Why X Can Get in the Bin)

Sometimes you build something just because you can.

After launching Subspace — my Star Trek episode API — yesterday, I had a thought: wouldn’t it be neat if it posted a random episode every day to social media? Just a little moment of Trek every afternoon, reminding folks how vast and weird and occasionally brilliant the franchise really is.

So I built it.

The Idea

The core idea was simple:

• At a set time each day, run a script.
• Pull a random episode from the Subspace API.
• Format a short, readable post with the episode title, series, season/episode number, and air date.
• Send that post to various social media sites.

A few small hurdles? Sure. But nothing major.

The Build

The script itself is a lightweight Python job that calls the Subspace API’s /episodes/random endpoint, formats the result with a nice readable date (none of that 2025-04-30 garbage — give me “30 April 2025” like a civilised person), and pushes it out via the relevant APIs.

Mastodon was first. It has a fairly straightforward API, well-documented and friendly to hobbyists. After generating an access token and picking a Redirect URI (by the way, urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob is just a placeholder when you’re not using a full web-based OAuth flow — in this case, it worked fine), I was up and running pretty quickly.

Bluesky was next. Also quite friendly. App passwords and straightforward endpoints made it easy enough to integrate.

Then There Was X

And this is where things went downhill for a bit.

Once upon a time, you could spin up a bot that posted to Twitter using their API without mortgaging your soul. Those days are long gone. Under the current regime, access to the API is locked behind a paywall — and not a small one. We’re talking US$200 per month if you want the kind of access that would allow even basic posting.

For a small one-post-a-day hobby bot? Ridiculous and completely out of the question.

So I didn’t bother and stripped out the Twitter integration entirely. Deleted the API keys, removed it from the .env, and moved on. If you’re looking for these posts, you’ll find them where APIs are still friendly: Mastodon and Bluesky.

Running It Automatically

Once the script was working, I set up a daily cron job on my server (running US Pacific time) to trigger at 6PM each evening. Nice and simple:

0 18 * * * ~/.venv/bin/python ~/trekbot/post.py >> ~/trekbot/cron.log 2>&1

The result? A daily hit of Star Trek, no manual effort required.

Final Thoughts

This was a fun little side project — small in scope, but surprisingly satisfying. It’s also another great use of the Subspace API, which I built partly as a learning tool and partly to scratch an itch.

As for X? I’ll say it again: get in the bin.