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
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.
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.
We do like to get stuck in a loop, no?
The point is that we are expecting newcomers to get a crash course on how Mastodon does content discovery and the dynamics of federation just to set up a completely harmless fleet of bots.
Then, when OP has the absolutely natural reaction of saying “look, this seems completely broken, I don’t care about these things you are asking and therefore I will just go play somewhere else”, we attack the messenger and his character instead of listening to the criticism and seeing where we could’ve done better.
I am not going to argue this point. My only point in this discussion is that one can safely self-host bots with a reasonable output and have little chance of being widely defederated. I merely wanted to debunk your argument that self-hosting such bots would be de-federated by everyone.
And I am not arguing “everyone will defederate from instances running bots”.
My argument is that admins see any “unwanted” activity and try to squash it on the grounds of “abusing the resources set up for the community”, instead of realizing that the it was the community’s interest in the service provided by the bots that was causing the excessive activity in the first place.
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.
You don’t need to tell me that the community-funded model is broken. I’m saying that for years already.
But there are two separate forces at play, here. Yes, there is this aspect of not having enough infrastructure and not enough manpower to support a larger group of users (which I agree, though I think it’s entirely self-inflicted) but there is also this strong cultural aspect of Fedi that equates being on the fringe as “cool” and that actively pushes Fedi to be a tiny, niche space that should be treated as some sort of secret club to keep the plebs away.
For this crowd, even if OP was running the bots on their own server, they would still be met with scorn because “they are using a microblog to send notifications”. It’s this culture that is pathetic. It’s this culture that pushes “normies” away, and if we don’t change this culture then there is no amount of funding or goodwill that will make Fedi a nice, fun, appealing place.
This here is not a farmers market. I wish this was a farmers market. People don’t go to a farmers market and tell the farmer they only need to cover the cost of the feed in order to get a whole chicken like people do here. No, sir. This is a soup kitchen where everyone pretends to be homeless in order to fit in.
To quote from one of your links:
Yet insects are by far the most populous group of animals on earth and often excell in cooperation and some form huge meta-organisms.
If the idea that drives the Fediverse wants to succeed we need to build 60.000 volunteer run Pixelfed etc. instances, and that is not an unrealistic number at all, but it takes time.
You can’t shortcut this process with more funding and commercial companies, because if you try, you end up with something completely different and most likely with another monopoly.
You’re arguing with a right-libertarian, FYI. This should explain some of their positions and arguments better.
I once had this conversation with some other “indie entrepreneur” who was arguing something along the lines of “I don’t care about VC funding because my competitors all come and go, and my business still endures.” When I asked “Does this mean that you can make out a living out of your business?” and his response was “no, but I have a full time job, so my business is default alive”
He wasn’t too happy when I pointed out (a) he had a hobby, not a business and (b) cockroaches are also optimized for survival, but outlasting your competitors mean jack shit if they are playing a different ball game. He spent all this time pretending to have a business while his competition was actually out there fighting for customers.
All of this to say: there is no consolation in being “right” in my death bed. I am not interested in something that “takes time” if in the mean time my kids are growing up in a world dominated by Big Tech. Anyone who understands how bad Big Tech is bad for society should be rushing and actively accelerating to build an alternative.
It’s is basically impossible to create a monopoly around FOSS services. It’s a commodity with high R&D costs but zero cost to distribute and replicate. You can only jack up the prices of commodities if you collude with your competitors or create a cartel.
The main thing holding back the development of a healthy cottage industry of hosting providers, consulting services, app customization, etc is not the Big Tech players, but precisely this “culture” of people expecting services for free.