from ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net to fediverse@lemmy.world on 14 Apr 15:13
https://slrpnk.net/post/20813532
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
threaded - newest
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.
Good Lord, you must be fun at parties.
People who use that phrase lack any sense of irony or self awareness.
Eh? They were flooding the local timeline with bot posts for sunset etc times for many different locations, meaning likely several bot posts
per houredit: 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.
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):
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?
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.
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.
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.
There are plenty of examples of monopolies built on FOSS technology. Especially in social media it is more about network effects and having enough funds to buy up any potential competitors. Facebook could be FOSS and it would not change anything.
The culture to expect this for “free” is not exclusive to the fediverse, and while it has been exploited by adtech companies to build large surveillance advertisement monopolies, it is by itself not wrong for people to expect that basic services are not held behind a paywall. It just needs another organisational model to function, and comercialisation is not going to work.
And besides those general considerations, your healty cottage industry is a pipe dream. Digital services have a fundamentally different economic basis that leads to huge efficiency gains at scale. If you do not actively work against that, any cottage industry will quickly consolidate around a few big players and you will basically have replicated the current system.
Citation needed?
I have no doubt that you point out some markets and see a large corporation dominating it. But a de facto monopoly? Not so much.
I’m sure you know that there are plenty of small businesses making a living out of email hosting, even if Google and MS account for 80% of the market.
In pretty much the same way that lots of local business just ditched their own web pages to go to Facebook, but this didn’t kill all the other website builders companies out there.
Now you are contradicting yourself. Sure, there are survival niches for small cockroach companies in the shawdow of the large FOSS based oligopolies, but that is the status quo and no improvement at all.
A “cockroach business” is something that has no significant revenue but at the same time takes up so little resources that can be operated forever. This is completely different from, e.g, small email hosting providers like Migadu or some agency that gets real customers to make wordpress customizations.
You can argue all you want about definitions, but that doesn’t change the fact that these companies are at the wim of the large oligopolies and pose absolutly no threat to them, nor do they even want to because their business indirectly depends on these oligopoles existing.
Why? We are talking about FOSS and services based on FOSS, here. Do you think that Google would be able to successfully shut down small email providers without repercussions?
Why is that relevant? I do not particularly care about eliminating the large corporations, at least not from the start. I’d be more than happy if we could grow this ecosystem here to become a sizable share of the overall market.
I’d rather work towards a world where Facebook has “only” 70% of the market to themselves and the rest of us foment a healthy economy sustaining the other 30%, than to keep this delusional idea that a scrappy bunch of nerds are going to be able to take Lemmy/Mastodon/PixelFed/Matrix/XMPP to the mainstream by wishful thinking and “community” alone.
Many of these email providers only exist as a less bad alternative but compatible with Gmail etc. And the oligopol could shut them down any time as their primary service is sending emails to the oligopol.
What you are proposing is basically to make the Fediverse a small managed opposition to Meta’s Threads, which I am sure Zuckerberg would love.
But that is not what the Fediverse tries to be and neither does it aim to become mainstream. We are doing prefigurative infrastructure building here. If people want to join, great. If not, also no problem. But if society decides to finally get rid of this capitalist hellscape, then the Fediverse will be there and ready to use.
I disagree about “the primary service” of a minority provider. The minority provider can do a lot more than just “send” emails to the larger share, and I think they can be instrumental for us to bring a tool from the intolerant minorities to the mainstream.
I also disagree about the idea of “managed opposition”. “Managed opposition” is what Mozilla does to Google with Firefox. They are paid by Google to be kept around. I am not saying that we should take the Fediverse and seek funding from Threads, or for us to depend on Facebook.
Finally, I have serious doubts that this “prefigurative infrastructure building” is effective. To me it seems like just a collective of aimless rebels who want to keep this universe secluded from everyone else, but it’s just too afraid to say it out loud.
Anyway, thanks for the chat. I understand I won’t be able to change your mind, but to go back to the original topic: I just wish that next time we don’t see someone as “toxic” just because they were not willing to put up with all these silly rules and rituals that everyone seems to follow without questioning.
Something, something Chestertons fence…
These “rituals” are vital for the continued existence of the Fediverse. Without a clear anti-capitalist and anti-oligopolist stance it will be co-opted and destroyed like many similar efforts that came before. You are being very naive if you can’t see that.
With this continued “anti-capitalist” stance there will never be anything to be destroyed. Without real investment and resources, this will be forever nothing more than a castle made of sand.
You sound like a reverse Tankie 😅 No proof of anything other than your ortodox economic believes, and when confronted with the living proof of the opposite (the Fediverse) you just claim that it can’t and will never exist 🤦
Millions of people are using it every month, and it seems to do just fine despite contstant claims since many years that it can’t survive…
“Millions of people”, let’s round it up to 10 million, ok?
Instagram reports 2 billion active users. TikTok reports 1.5 billion, Facebook reports 3 billion. So, the Fediverse as a whole gets maybe to reach 0.6% of the major networks.
Do you want compare only with the Threadiverse with Reddit? Let’s be again be generous here and round it up to 60k MAU. Reddit is reporting around 75 million MAU. So, even if we consider that Reddit is lying like crazy and that 2/3 of the users on Reddit are fake, Reddit is ~400 times larger.
This is cockroach levels of usage.
Yes, the Fediverse will survive. But it doesn’t mean that it ever was relevant.
See long argument above. It exists and is viable for millions of people. Once people decide they want something other than corporate social media, the Fediverse is there. There is no point in trying to make the Fediverse a copy of the corporate social media to appeal to users that see no reason to switch. The Fediverse is relevant regardless of the size, because it proves a real alternative is possible and viable.
Again, this is just a lazy cop-out and a perfect display of the hubris here that is so off-putting.
You make it sound that the people using Instagram or TikTok are there because they like the Surveillance Capitalism, or getting bombard by ads, or they are all sucking up to Zuckerberg. Have you ever considered that maybe people are still there because they actually like some of the features they use in the products and they can’t find it here?
Have you actually talked to some people using TikTok? Yes, they do like the personalized algorithmic feed, and that is inseperable from the surveillance part, and they certainly don’t want to pay for it either.
The ones with hubris are people like you that think they can turn the Fediverse into the next big thing. Of course people already on the fediverse are going try raining on your parade 🤷
There is absolutely nothing stopping the personalization algorithms to run on-device or delegated to a separate service from the video feed.
It doesn’t have to be a “donation/public funding” vs “ads/surveillance capitalism” dichotomy. I bet we can find alternative models of governance and funding, provided we get to a place Fediverse is relevant enough to attract the attention of some small business, media channels, institutions, etc.
But that is not how the TikTok recommendation algorithm works and doing it locally only would be a very poor substitute most likely, as it seem to also recommend what other people with a similar behavior pattern have liked. And the same algorithm is used to identify suitable targets for advertisers, so the two are basically inseparable.
That’s like saying the community garden needs to be relevant enough to attract a seed shop and a fast-food stand etc. And a few weeks later there is no more community garden but rather a strip mall owned by the local oligopolists renting out booths to entrepreneurs. That is just not helpful at all, because it destroys the very foundation of what the Fediverse tries to achieve.
Says who? You and the gatekeepers who’d rather have everyone stuck in the past, just to preserve some technical/ideological purity?
You are mixing up two topics here. If someone wants to experiment with a local only algorithmic feed that’s fine, but I can practically guarantee that this will never be enough to convince people to switch from TikTok and the like.
And the other topic is about commercialization. You are the one stuck in the past thinking that is the only way for the Fediverse to succeed. Quite on the contrary, if anyone seriously tried that it would fail quickly and just result in burned investments and a lot of goodwill towards the Fediverse lost.
What do you think that Automattic, Flipboard and Ghost are doing? Do you think they are paying people to develop integrations with AP because they are really nice people and have zero intentions of profiting from their investments?
Look, I better leave this conversation. I should have learned by now that there is no point in arguing with ideologues.
The problem is that you are the ideologue but fail to realize that. Capitalism is an ideology and a very harmful one.
As for those investments, lets see, but I don’t expect much to come from those.
You’re arguing with a right-libertarian, FYI. This should explain some of their positions and arguments better.
You have no idea how wrong you are, but if this is what you need to believe to sleep at night, I won’t be able or interested in changing your mind.
If it quacks like a duck, and it walks like a duck…
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.
This is exactly what you were arguing. There’s no reason to bring up alien.top otherwise.
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”.
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.
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.
Blocked for bot spam
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah I can get that from my weather app. That’s probably why the admin doesn’t want it to be discoverable.
So they are complaining that their bots would be invisible, because on Twitter the algorithm would down-rank such bot spam hard and have the same effect? That person clearly has no clue what they are talking about and just wants to abuse a public instance for their pet project 🙄
Edit: finished reading the article… good riddance that they are gone. What a self-centered and toxic person 🤦
Discussion about the same article a few days ago: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/41958841
Appreciate it! I didn’t even see that.
And now this one has a lot of comments. 😭
Fun contrast to what’s happening on bluesky
lemmy.sdf.org/post/32751288