Séance — a ritual to channel the unseen

Séance is simple tool to make it easy to proxy messages under a bot account. It includes a Discord bot, and a very experimental Telegram bot.

The Ritual

Séance is written in Python, and as such can be easily installed via pip: pip3 install git+https://github.com/Qyriad/Seance.

Once it is installed, the Discord bot can be run with seance-discord. The Discord bot requires a Discord bot token passed with --token or the $SEANCE_DISCORD_TOKEN environment variable, the snowflake ID of the user to recognize messages to proxy from passed with --ref-user-id or the $SEANCE_DISCORD_REF_USER_ID environment variable, and a pattern in Python regex passed with --pattern or the $SEANCE_DISCORD_PATTERN environment variable. The pattern must include a named capture group called content, which defines the content to proxy.

Okay, that sounds really complicated, so here's an example, where the format for proxying messages is anything that starts b: — capital or lowercase.

$ seance-discord --token ODDFOFXUpgf7yEntul5ockCA.OFk6Ph.lmsA54bT0Fux1IpsYvey5XuZk04 --ref-user-id 188344527881400991 --pattern "[bB]:(?P<content>.*)"

Note that the Discord bot also requires the Presence and Server Members Privileged Gateway Intents, which can be enabled in the "Bot" settings of the Discord application page.

Config File

Anything that can be passed as a command-line option can also be specified an INI config file. Options for the Discord bot are placed under a [Discord] section, with the name of the INI key being the same as the command-line option without the leading --. Words can be separated by dashes, underscores, or spaces. For example, --ref-user-id 188344527881400991 can be any of the following:

ref_user_id = 188344527881400991
ref user id = 188344527881400991
ref-user-id = 188344527881400991

Specify the config file to use on the command-line with --config /path/to/file (this is the one option that cannot itself be passed in a config file 😉). Options specified on the command line override options specified in a configuration file.

An example configuration file (which is functionally identical to the seance-discord CLI example invocation above) can be found in contrib/.

Commands

Once started, the bot also accepts a few chat commands:

• !edit [reply|link] <new content> — takes a reply or a link to a message, and the new message content
• !s/pattern/replacement — takes a reply, and a sed-style substitution command to edit a message
• !status [playing | streaming | listening to | watching | competing in] <status> — sets the bot's status ("playing" is the default if not specified)
• !presence [invisible|dnd|idle|online|sync] — sets the bot's presence to the specified value, or sets it to synchronize it to the reference user
• !nick [nickname] — sets the bot's nickname

The Séance CLI also takes an optional argument --prefix, which is an additional prefix to accept commands with. This is intended for cases where a single Discord user has more than one associated Séance bot, in order to be able to direct commands to a particular instance. For example, passing --prefix b allows you to run the chat command b!status to set the status for that specific instance of Séance.

systemd

There is also a sample file for running the Séance Discord bot as a systemd service in contrib. Note that for proper systemd support the Python package sdnotify is also required (pip3 install sdnotify). If you do not wish to enable this feature, you should remove the --systemd-notify argument from the provided service.

It is suggested that you create a specific non-privileged user to run the bot under, the service config assumes this user is called "seance".

Such a user can be created with sudo useradd seance. To avoid installing Séance globally, which might be ill-advised, you can create a home directory for the user, something like sudo useradd --create-home --home-dir /srv/seance seance will create a home directory for the user in /srv/seance.

To install seance and sdnotify for this user use sudo -u seance pip3 install --user sdnotify git+https://github.com/Qyriad/Seance.

Nix and NixOS

Séance provides a Nix flake, this flake contains a package definition for Séance and a NixOS service module for configuring and running it.

To use the module in your NixOS configuration:

1. Add the Séance flake to your NixOS configuration: seance.url = "github:Qyriad/Séance.git".
2. Import the NixOS module somewhere in your configuration: { seance, ... }: { imports = [ seance.nixosModules.default ]; };.
3. Configure the services see example.
4. Rebuild your NixOS configuration.

Discord DM Mode

TODO: fill this out more >.>

Limitations:

• Bots do not receive typing notifications in DMs, so typing notification in a DM to the Séance user will not be proxied to the DM server.
• Bots cannot be added to group DMs, so neither can Séance users

Comparison to PluralKit

Pros of Séance over PluralKit on Discord:

• Much faster proxy times
• No webhooks; real Discord account
  • Role colors in name
  • Real replies

Cons of Séance over PluralKit on Discord:

• Requires self-hosting
• Requires a separate instance for each proxy/account
• Each instance requires Manage Messages permissions on each server
• Only a tool for proxying; not an all-in-one plural companion tool and never will be