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

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[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 6 points 4 months ago (45 children)

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.news 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (44 children)

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.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 4 months ago (11 children)

Botsin.space existed for a long while and wasn't widely defederated. Just saying...

[–] rglullis@communick.news 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, instead if closed down because it couldn't support itself. What an amazing alternative you are proposing...

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

And I am not arguing "everyone will defederate from instances running bots".

This is exactly what you were arguing. There's no reason to bring up alien.top otherwise.

This is not an hypothetical scenario. It happened with alien.top.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Wait, not only are you misinterpreting what I said (I used alien.top as a case of for "admins will want to defederate because of resource abuse even when their own users find it useful" and less about "admins will ban any bot-only instance") but your interpretation directly contradicts your first point.

Yeah, you can add the "reasonable output" qualifier all you want. This would be a subjective point. I for one think that a fleet of 98 bots posting each once a day is not even worth of consideration, but clearly some disagree and are willing to treat the guy as "toxic".

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Wait, not only are you misinterpreting what I said (I used alien.top as a case of for "admins will want to defederate because of resource abuse even when their own users find it useful" and less about "admins will ban any bot-only instance") but your interpretation directly contradicts your first point.

And I bring up botsin.space as a bot-heavy instance which wasn't widely defederated which obviuously proves you wrong on what constitures "resource abuse" enough to be defederated. I.e. you're cherry-picking your example to prove your point. There's a difference between an instance trying to duplicate all of fucking reddit, and 24 bots posting 2xday. FFS.

Yeah, you can add the "reasonable output" qualifier all you want. This would be a subjective point.

With botsin.space, we have a good example of what is reasonable to not be defederated.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

There’s a difference between an instance trying to duplicate all of fucking reddit

There were fewer than 200 subreddits being mirrored. This is far from "all of reddit".
Some of them were also mirroring comments, but the large majority was post-only.
I was implementing a bunch of filters to bring the noise down.
The bots from alien.top were posting only to instances that I also own.
No content was being pushed out. If the content from alien.top was ending up on your instance, it was because your users were interested in the content.
Even after I disabled most of the bots (I think that now it's only mirroring stuff to sfw.community), the ban on the instance persisted.

With botsin.space, we have a good example of what is reasonable to not be defederated

We also have a good example of an instance that is dead. There is no point in giving that as an example, if no one can actually use it.

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