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.

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

…

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

  • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
    312·
    6 days ago

    I’m really not sure that a microblogging platform is the right channel for sunrise and sunset times in the first place. Personally if I wanted that info, I’d go look up a table. But you’re always welcome to host your own instance, if you want to (ab)use the protocol like this.

    • heavyboots@lemmy.mlEnglish
      14·
      6 days ago

      Yeah this seems like a weird use case for Mastodon to me too. Also, the entire point of Mastodon is that no one entity can control it all. Switching to BlueSky is basically just falling straight back into the trap where someone can buy it out and repurpose it as a disinformation machine again. I’m not saying ActivityPub is perfect, mind you. Just that it sucks less (for me) than the alternative.

    • Ulrich@feddit.orgEnglish
      71·
      6 days ago

      Yeah I can get that from my weather app. That’s probably why the admin doesn’t want it to be discoverable.

      • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
        19·
        6 days ago

        Eh? They were flooding the local timeline with bot posts for sunset etc times for many different locations, meaning likely several bot posts per hour edit: looking at the actual list of locations it was probably one per minute or so. That would get them banned on pretty much any instance.

        By their words: “Not worth the effort” to run your own instance my ass… don’t abuse a gratis public service with bot spam.

        • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
          4·
          6 days ago

          You really made me look…

          There are 98 bots, each one was posting exactly once a day. That’s an average of one post every 14 minutes.

          • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
            5·
            6 days ago

            Not one for sunset and another one for dawn? But ok, I overestimated it a bit, but 4 posts per hour is still bot spam.

            • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
              33·
              6 days ago

              4 posts per hour on an instance with 12 thousand active users, and the only reason the mas.to admin found to complain about it is “it pollutes the local timeline”.

              I’m sorry, this is beyond stupid. The bot was not abusing any hashtags, the bots were split among different locations precisely to make them relevant only for the people in a certain location. Yeah, OP could’ve changed the bots to “quiet public” listing, but (a) this is a new “feature” from Mastodon and (b) relevant only for people who are anal about the “local timeline”, which in an instance of 12 thousand people is as useful as any random firehose.

              • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
                1·
                6 days ago

                This is not a new feature, it was only renamed from “unlisted” to “quiet public”, and setting bots to that is an entirely reasonable demand, especially if they are only ment for location specific subscriptions.

                I agree that on a 12k user instance the local feed is less useful (and that the instance is way too big), but this is probably why they are especially “anal” about bot spam making it even worse.

        • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
          23·
          6 days ago

          How many of these bots existed on Twitter and were used to illustrate the point that the API being open was important to have a thriving ecosystem?

          But this is not even why I am calling out the parent. I just find it ridiculous that OP brings a whole list of more-than-reasonable issues with Mastodon (and by extension the Fediverse):

          1. Federation does not work (Federation is the wrong governance structure for decentralized social media)
          2. Account migration does not work (Coupling of identity to server)
          3. Direct messaging does not work (Messages are not really private, and Mastodon pretends to make them so)
          4. Content moderation does not work (Relates to #1)
          5. Live feeds do not work (Much like “browsing by all” in Lemmy, it’s a really bad execution to try to solve the issue of content discovery)
          6. Mastodon development does not work (Slow, opinionated on the “wrong” things, failing to respond to user’s requests)
          7. Mastodon culture does not work (The stereotypical user is just anti-everything, most instances are full of school-hall monitors, reject anything that resembles mainstream and end up becoming incredibly reactionary, boring people cross-playing as armchair revolutionaries)

          And to all of that, the first response that we find here is some completely irrelevant pontification about how one “shouldn’t be using a microblog to send notifications”?

          Like, really? This is the type of things that we should be concerned about? What’s next? People shouldn’t write a match threader bot because “following sports updates is not the place for a discussion forum”?

          For crying out loud, have we completely forgotten how to have fun here?

          • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
            5·
            6 days ago

            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.

            • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
              23·
              6 days ago

              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?

              • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
                6·
                6 days ago

                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 🤦

                • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
                  11·
                  6 days ago

                  Again, missing the forest because there is one tree you don’t like:

                  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.

                  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.

                  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
                    3·
                    6 days ago

                    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?

                    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.