Two years of Botwiki

Botwiki is now two years old! 🎂👏👏👏🎉

It all started with a simple idea to catalog examples of friendly online bots, mainly to serve as an inspiration for creative projects. I quickly added more projects and initiatives, some of which had to be put aside after a while. Making art bots is still a pretty tiny niche, and maintaining a sideproject takes quite a bit of time.

Botwiki is still one of a kind website that covers all kinds of friendly online bots, provides resources and tutorials on how to make them, but you can also find essays about the impact of automation on our society and latest news and events concerning AI or misbehaving bots.

Here are some interesting numbers showing how much Botwiki grew:

• there are over 550 bots on Botwiki and links to various maintained websites and lists with even more bots
• Botwiki gets between 15,000 and 20,000 unique visitors each month
• Botwiki has a dedicated page on Glitch with 6 starter projects
• @botwikidotorg has more than 2,100 followers
• the Bot! zine newsletter has now over 1,000 subscribers — big thanks to Veronica who took over it a little over a year ago and continues to send it out every week to a growing audience
• and finally, Botmakers, which will also soon celebrate two years, has over 3,600 members

It wasn’t an easy journey to get here, and I want to thank everyone who supported Botwiki either through donations, volunteer work, or just spreading the word about the site. Every little bit of help counts toward what Botwiki is right now.

With that being said, there are still many more bots and botmaking resources that I want to see added to the site. There is still a lot of work ahead, so don’t hesitate and reach out if you’d like to help.

Thank you for joining me to celebrate the start of Botwiki’s third year, and here’s to seeing it grow even bigger ?

— Stefan