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
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”.