I am currently winding down the Mastodon bots I used to post sunrise and sunset times. The precipitating event is that the admin of the instance hosting the associated accounts demanded they be made nigh-undiscoverable, but the underlying cause is that it’s become increasing clear that Mastodon isn’t, and won’t ever be, a good platform for “asynchronous ephemeral notifications of any kind”. I’d also argue (more controversially) that it’s simply not good infrastructure for social networking of any kind. There are lots of interesting people using Mastodon, and I’m sure it will live on as a good-enough space for certain niche groups. But there is no question that it will never offer the fun of early Twitter, let alone the vibrancy of Twitter during its growth phase. I’ve long since dropped Mastodon from my home screen, and have switched to Bluesky for text-centric social media
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Federation does not work I’m not saying federation “won’t” work or “can’t” work. Merely that in 2025, nine years after deployment, federation does not work for the Mastodon use case.
I could opine at length about possible federated architectures and what I think the ActivityPub people clearly got wrong in hindsight.1 But the proof is in the pudding: Mastodon simply doesn’t show users the posts they ask to see, as I quickly
The bot issue is what both OP mainly quoted and also what the author of the article is complaining about as the issue that got them to quit. So you are wondering that people point out that this bot use is clear service abuse?
It only works on Twitter, because Twitter immediatly hides those bots via their algorithm, which apparently is also bad when the Mastodon instance admin suggested something very similar?
As for the rest of the article… mostly nonsense or rather a fundamental misunderstanding what ActivityPub wants to achive. Only point 3 and 6 have any merit and 6 can be easily solved by using another fediverse software.
I guess you are (like the parent I responded to) too hung up on a technicality and missing the forest for the trees.
You can bet that even if OP decided to use his own instance to run the bots, there would be admins that would find reason to complain. Why would I be so sure of that? Because that’s exactly what happened with alien.top.
Like any “exit interview” or “break up talk”, the exact reasons that make someone leave the platform is not the real signal. The real signal to me here is that ActivityPub had one person interested in building stuff (doesn’t matter if they are good or not), they were completely unwelcomed about it, and then they decided to move on to Bluesky.
Do you think that the Bluesky people are going to be nagging OP with this stupid “you can’t have fun here!” mentality? At the end of the day, where do you think newcomers will be more interested in trying out stuff? In our playground or on Bluesky’s?
There are reasonable complaints and unreasonable ones. If they had run their own instance people could have just blocked or defederated instead of it polluting the important local feed of the instance they chose to abuse.
They were unwelcome because they were not building something on their own, but abusing a free service with it. If they had run this on their own instance I would completely agree with you that complaints would be unreasonable, and such unreasonable complaints are by far not the majority opinion on the Fediverse despite of what some badly informed haters like to claim.
Bluesky is a centralized system with a single feed that is so fast moving and full of spam that a little bit more would not be noticed indeed. But that is not a good thing.
And anyways, the fun stops if you abuse other peoples work and fun projects with your “fun”. Asking to unlist the bots is entirely reasonable and would have not impacted the operation of these bots at all. But apparently there was a big ego that didn’t like the idea and decided to throw a fit about it 🤦
Again, missing the forest because there is one tree you don’t like:
What about the users on mas.to who wanted to follow the bots? Why do they have to simply accept that they can not follow the solar bots because the admin is fussy about the local timeline?
This is not an hypothetical scenario. It happened with alien.top. There were users from LW that wanted the mirror bots from alien.top. That’s why they subscribed to it, and LW (among some others) decided to shut it down.
Now, what do you think would be the appropriate response to the users of LW? Do you think those voluntarily following the communities were seeing it as the bots as “abusing the instance” or “providing an useful service”?
when dealing with alien.top, admins had these choices:
defederate and tell users to move instance if they want to see alien.top content
demonize the creator of the instance for the crime of “flooding the Fediverse with content people were interested in receiving”
accept all content anyway and figure out a way to bear the extra costs to serve your community
Each one of them, no exceptions, shows a different systemic failure with the Fediverse.
If it was a remote instance they would not show up on the local feed, and only those bot someone local actually subscribed to would show up on the federated timeline. Hence it would be very unlikely that these bots would be have been banned by mas.to and thus their users would not have been effected at all.
alien.top was way, way worse than 4 post an hour, so the comparison does not hold. And people can easily move to another instance that allows bot spam if they wish so.
But this entire argument is besides the point. alien.top did not abuse lemmy.world to publish their bots, so it can not be compared to the situation here.
As for those three points: that is not a “systematic failure” at all, but the system working as intended and defending itself against abuse. If people want to subscribe to bot spam they can start their own instance or register directly on alien.top.
Not only the distinction between local/federated timeline is completely irrelevant for most people, the whole concept of “timelines” only exist because the system does not provide an efficient global discovery mechanism.
And just by trying to explain this, we’ve lost like 90% of the potential user base.
And to make it worse, you think that people need to think about all of this when onboarding?
No, this is way for individual nodes to protect themselves, but the idea of protection here only counts for the admins.
No, they will just go back to the social media platforms that gives them what they want without getting judged by it.
Why would they register on alien.top, when the largest “organic instances” defederated from it and effectively removed any chance of making it attractive for real people that were looking for a “soft” migration?
Sorry, but if all you want is to recreate the corporate social media 1:1 then indeed Bluesky is the better place to be.
The local (and a well curated federated) non-algorithmic feed is one of the main advantages the Fediverse has and why many people prefer it over corporate social media. By polluting it with bot spam and other similar efforts you are indeed making these feeds irrelevant and break the organic peer discovery concept the Fediverse is built on. If some people prefer algorithmically curated and surveillance advertisement polluted social media then the Fediverse is just not the right place for them 🤷♂️
The Fediverse is built by server admins and can only be sustainable if the admins are able to protect their servers against abuse. Infrastructure does not magically appear, and the Fediverse does not have deep VC funded pockets to just make it so.
What a lame, lazy and self-righteous cop-out!
I am not talking about “recreating corporate social media”. I am saying that the culture here is completely broken. It is dominated by this loud reactionary group of people who think of themselves of oh-so-welcoming and oh-so-progressive, but that takes any newcomer and shoves them away at the slight deviation of the current norms. And now that someone has come and writes an honest critique, your defense mechanism is to call them toxic?
If only we managed to be just a little bit more appealing to the masses, so that we could have an actual ecosystem with a healthy economy then we wouldn’t need to depend on VC pockets and we would be able to serve everyone. All we need is to find a way to attract some of those who looked our way and we can then show how we can have a fun place without depending on Big Tech, right?
But no, apparently the “right thing to do” is to create division over the most ridiculous things (bots posting every 14 minutes! To an instance of 12k users! Blasphemy!) and further pigeonholing us into the “The Fediverse is only for weirdos and social pariahs” territory.
I am not expecting you to have a full “are we the baddies?” realization, but hol-li-eey shit when I find myself in arguments like these I lose another slice of hope on the Fediverse as a healthy universal alternative to the web. For all the talk about building the Fediverse to fight Big Tech, we sure spend a lot of energy attacking the wrong targets.
Sorry but lets agree to (fundamentally) disagree.
People coming in with this “who cares what my fun does to others” yolo attitude that assumes volunteer run public services are some sort of free resource up for the taking, are fundamentally at odds with what the Fediverse tries to achieve and extremely toxic to it. This is not a lazy cop out, that is clearly telling people at the door that they seem to have the wrong idea what this is all about. And no, this isn’t only about those nearly 100 bots polluting the local timeline… its about having clear rules against such abuse and not making exceptions because someone with a big ego thinks their specific bots are harmless (spoiler: nearly everyone thinks that of their pet project).
And you are completely wrong if you think this effort can be funded by being “just a little bit more appealing to the masses”. The opposite is the case. This leads to burnout of the volunteers, over-streched infrastructure and people that soon leave again because someone lied to them about what the Fediverse is. You can’t put a Mc Donalds sign in front of a farmers market and expect that will magically bring customers and solve all of the farmers market’s funding issues.
Botsin.space existed for a long while and wasn’t widely defederated. Just saying…
Yeah, instead if closed down because it couldn’t support itself. What an amazing alternative you are proposing…
I wasn’t supporting an alternative. I was merely pointing the lie in your statement that having bots in one’s instance is grounds for massive defederation. Don’t try to divert.
There were plenty of instances that had botsin.space on automatic blocklist. On par with instances that block bird.makeup or any other Twitter mirrors.
plenty of instances have mastodon.art and tech.lgbt defederated. So what? Your point was that it would be widespread, which was factually not the case. It was nowhere widespread and I know this because I was using it for my bots and could see their reach.