Questions about Social Media bots

Yo!

I'm trying to create bots to make some money, I've seen a lot of people making/using them and make a lot of money off of them. So!

I'm familiar with Python + Selenium and other libraries to automate things, but I want to gather more ideas and features that my bot has to offer and make your life easier

I'm thinking about Instagram bot right now, I haven't seen/used bots of that kind since I rarely use Social Media apps (Not anymore lol). The basic features such as likes, comments, following and scheduling posts are a must. making the bot looks as humanly as possible as also necessary to avoid bans.

I'm trying to think about something: we can keep tabs on active account that they follow us, if they're not active, we unfollow them. But I don't if you have more followers, notifications will popup for every like, comment so we can track our followers...

I'm also thinking about automating bot creation/automation too, so they can mention and share each other and more stuff (<- long term, not impossible, but doable, I think)

I wanna know more about what features/suggestions you guys want in a bot, whether for Facebook, Insta, and other apps. And if you have any ideas, just let me know.
Also any advice is welcome, so thank you

@mods can you guys move this to "Social Media" section?
sorry for the trouble.

So, you want to sell your bots?

mnunes532 said:

So, you want to sell your bots?

Click to expand...

I figured I can code a little bit, guess I can some income out of it
I'm not really good with marketing and other stuff, maybe i'll lurking on the forums to learn more

caCODEmon said:

I figured I can code a little bit, guess I can some income out of it
I'm not really good with marketing and other stuff, maybe i'll lurking on the forums to learn more

Click to expand...

Ok, if you want to sell bots, you'll need to code them using http requests and not selenium.

My advice is to use those bots to your own projects and then, when you have more knowledge/experience, sell them.

mnunes532 said:

Ok, if you want to sell bots, you'll need to code them using http requests and not selenium.

My advice is to use those bots to your own projects and then, when you have more knowledge/experience, sell them.

Click to expand...

Wait, I use Selenium in order to automate "human behaviour". can we achieve this using http requests? I think it depends on the task, right?
InstaPy uses Selenium. any resources or advice are always welcome.

caCODEmon said:

Wait, I use Selenium in order to automate "human behaviour". can we achieve this using http requests? I think it depends on the task, right?
InstaPy uses Selenium. any resources or advice are always welcome.

Click to expand...

Yes, but you need to send all requests as the browser/app would. The advantages are: it consumes less resources (ram, cpu), you can run more threads because of the 1st point, its faster, etc.

mnunes532 said:

Yes, but you need to send all requests as the browser/app would. The advantages are: it consumes less resources (ram, cpu), you can run more threads because of the 1st point, its faster, etc.

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How are you gonna for example "like" a post using http requests only? Do they have an API? Using threads is sure way to get banned quickly, no one can like 20 posts in a sec lol.
Using an automated browser can have its advantages, like executing JS scripts if needed. It's all about growing your account without getting banned.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I just didn't understand how you do it.
Thanks!

caCODEmon said:

How are you gonna for example "like" a post using http requests only? Do they have an API? Using threads is sure way to get banned quickly, no one can like 20 posts in a sec lol.
Using an automated browser can have its advantages, like executing JS scripts if needed. It's all about growing your account without getting banned.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I just didn't understand how you do it.
Thanks!

Click to expand...

You have to reverse engineer the api call there's no official api available for that, you're not going to send 20 likes for the same account in a second the ideal would be to add a delay of random minutes/hours between likes, there's no need to use threads if you are not going to automate thousands of accounts.

There are some problems using browsers when you want to scale, they're expensive (cpu, mem) and are error prone, also you can't only use selenium and call it a day, there are way more things that you have to take care of as cookies, webrtc, 3d render, proxy, etc...
There is a tool that let you check if you're undetectable.

In short words: You can use selenium to automate your own accounts as a test (probably max. 10) but there are more things that you should take care of, also don't use accounts that will hurt to lose with selenium.

hexagonal said:

You have to reverse engineer the api call there's no official api available for that, you're not going to send 20 likes for the same account in a second the ideal would be to add a delay of random minutes/hours between likes, there's no need to use threads if you are not going to automate thousands of accounts.

There are some problems using browsers when you want to scale, they're expensive (cpu, mem) and are error prone, also you can't only use selenium and call it a day, there are way more things that you have to take care of as cookies, webrtc, 3d render, proxy, etc...
There is a tool that let you check if you're undetectable.

In short words: You can use selenium to automate your own accounts as a test (probably max. 10) but there are more things that you should take care of, also don't use accounts that will hurt to lose with selenium.

Click to expand...

I didn't know about reverse-engineering APIs until now :/
Most of the bots, at least the ones I saw in GitHub were made using Selenium (InstaPy). I'm not that good like some of you here, but I'd like to learn more
I think I'm gonna do more research here, especially on reversing an API, so, thanks!
btw, if you have any good resources for Python, botting or anything. let me know, I apperciate it

For my use case the browser based wouldn’t be horrible.

caCODEmon said:

I didn't know about reverse-engineering APIs until now :/
Most of the bots, at least the ones I saw in GitHub were made using Selenium (InstaPy). I'm not that good like some of you here, but I'd like to learn more
I think I'm gonna do more research here, especially on reversing an API, so, thanks!
btw, if you have any good resources for Python, botting or anything. let me know, I apperciate it

Click to expand...

Don't worry all of us started somewhere.
See the files in InstaPy and check the version of selenium that they are using and the flags that they're passing, I was surprised at how well it performs being an open source project, you could start copying the flags and the selenium that they use and start diving why everything happens, there are also some stealth selenium open source if you want to try them.
I wouldn't dig that deep into reverse engineer of APIS that's such a rabbit hole and automating through API requires more research and time. I was thinking about your approach of using selenium for hundreds of accounts and it may work,

INFRASTRUCTURE TALK BORING
allocating 5 minutes through the day for each account ( 1 minute per acc each 3 hours and the rest of time just cooldown ) you could run 288 accs per VPS and you won't need a fancy VPS one in the free tier of AWS will do the trick.

Scaling that would be the "hard" part as you will need either to do some horizontal ( adding more vps ) or vertical ( increasing the VPS resources ) but that would be something to think in the future.
INFRASTRUCTURE TALK BORING

Neat! You can either sell the bots or, if you're sufficiently confident and skilled at botting now/ have acquaintances who can collaborate with you, you can be a freelancer and code for other people here.

@hexagonal explained it very well

In resume, here's what I do: do some quick tests using a bunch of accounts and selenium. If the method works, I try to decrease the time/resources spent automating it.

Some stuff I don't bother much and use selenium, but if you want to bot on a large scale, say 100+ accounts, you need to use other tactics.

For example, I do some scraping using selenium. Sometimes I just need it to run for some minutes/hours using one instance of the browser while I use http requests to follow/message users.

My current pc has a very low amount or ram and I can only run at maximum 2 chromes at a time with selenium but that's enough for testing purposes.

just remember if you wish to sell the bots here, you have to become
a paid seller. 97$ a year . just a heads up.

Systemctl said:

For my use case the browser based wouldn’t be horrible. If you do go forward I would be interested in using my sms to make accounts.

Click to expand...

So, you wanna "verify" your accounts with these messages? For example: using Twilio to receive these messages and automate that for your accounts?

hexagonal said:

Don't worry all of us started somewhere.
See the files in InstaPy and check the version of selenium that they are using and the flags that they're passing, I was surprised at how well it performs being an open source project, you could start copying the flags and the selenium that they use and start diving why everything happens, there are also some stealth selenium open source if you want to try them.
I wouldn't dig that deep into reverse engineer of APIS that's such a rabbit hole and automating through API requires more research and time. I was thinking about your approach of using selenium for hundreds of accounts and it may work,

INFRASTRUCTURE TALK BORING
allocating 5 minutes through the day for each account ( 1 minute per acc each 3 hours and the rest of time just cooldown ) you could run 288 accs per VPS and you won't need a fancy VPS one in the free tier of AWS will do the trick.

Scaling that would be the "hard" part as you will need either to do some horizontal ( adding more vps ) or vertical ( increasing the VPS resources ) but that would be something to think in the future.
INFRASTRUCTURE TALK BORING

Click to expand...

You're right
I'll try to disect InstaPy and see how its logic works and what feature it has to offer, I gotta think of something that makes the bot stands out.
The first main goal is to make a bot that generates organic followers, and a good number of them daily. There's a LOT of bots on that site, especially in the explore section. From there, we can reverse the API to make it resource-less and more compact. for now I'll stick with Selenium and we'll see how it goes.
Interesting about VPS free tier, Hope they didn't abused it to oblivion! lol

mnunes532 said:

@hexagonal explained it very well

In resume, here's what I do: do some quick tests using a bunch of accounts and selenium. If the method works, I try to decrease the time/resources spent automating it.

Some stuff I don't bother much and use selenium, but if you want to bot on a large scale, say 100+ accounts, you need to use other tactics.

For example, I do some scraping using selenium. Sometimes I just need it to run for some minutes/hours using one instance of the browser while I use http requests to follow/message users.

My current pc has a very low amount or ram and I can only run at maximum 2 chromes at a time with selenium but that's enough for testing purposes.

Click to expand...

We'll start with one, then 10, and we'll see when it starts getting slower and switch to new tactics.
You seriously need more ram, cpu power to handle hundreds of accounts, thank God they're not as expensive as GPUs, those things are rediculously costly.

imccafey said:

Neat! You can either sell the bots or, if you're sufficiently confident and skilled at botting now/ have acquaintances who can collaborate with you, you can be a freelancer and code for other people here.

Click to expand...

If it works (I'm working on it currently) probably the first version will released for free so you guys can give me some feedback(hope it doesn't suck! ;-) )
That's the goal, making a living coding bots, freelancing and of course, investing!

proxygo said:

just remember if you wish to sell the bots here, you have to become
a paid seller. 97$ a year . just a heads up.

Click to expand...

Well, if I manage to make good bots, I'll make sure to buy a subscription for the next 5 years! You won't miss me!

caCODEmon said:

So, you wanna "verify" your accounts with these messages? For example: using Twilio to receive these messages and automate that for your accounts?


You're right
I'll try to disect InstaPy and see how its logic works and what feature it has to offer, I gotta think of something that makes the bot stands out.
The first main goal is to make a bot that generates organic followers, and a good number of them daily. There's a LOT of bots on that site, especially in the explore section. From there, we can reverse the API to make it resource-less and more compact. for now I'll stick with Selenium and we'll see how it goes.
Interesting about VPS free tier, Hope they didn't abused it to oblivion! lol

We'll start with one, then 10, and we'll see when it starts getting slower and switch to new tactics.
You seriously need more ram, cpu power to handle hundreds of accounts, thank God they're not as expensive as GPUs, those things are rediculously costly.

If it works (I'm working on it currently) probably the first version will released for free so you guys can give me some feedback(hope it doesn't suck! ;-) )
That's the goal, making a living coding bots, freelancing and of course, investing!

Well, if I manage to make good bots, I'll make sure to buy a subscription for the next 5 years! You won't miss me!

Click to expand...

You mentioned earlier the automation of what I assumed creating Insta accounts. I thought sms was required. I’m manually making accounts with numbers I own and want to step back and passively.

I made bots with selenium, especially instagram. I think selenium is really a good tool.

Ok you wont probably run 100 threads properly but if your focus is to make an IG bot, i dont really think they absolutely needs to run 100 threads like a gmail creator/ account creator or smm panel. So your plan dont sound bad at all and if you check ppl are searching ig bots alot. I supose the ppl whos searching these service are searching it for marketing purpose and automate their follow/like/post on day to day basis. I use my own ig bot for promoting mobiles app and it definitely do the job.

If never you need some help feel free to ask.

Good luck

Systemctl said:

You mentioned earlier the automation of what I assumed creating Insta accounts. I thought sms was required. I’m manually making accounts with numbers I own and want to step back and passively.

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I opened my account yesterday with my email, no phone was required, I'll try with protonmail or tutanota and let you know.
Do you receive these verification numbers on your phone or is there a website you use for these numbers/sms?

caCODEmon said:

I opened my account yesterday with my email, no phone was required, I'll try with protonmail or tutanota and let you know.
Do you receive these verification numbers on your phone or is there a website you use for these numbers/sms?

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I do both. I have a few 4g lte modems where I can see the text messages but it’s 1 by 1. And I also use the common sms websites which you probably already know. I’m trying to get more use out the numbers I have by doing social media and more