Comment on Mastodon Exit Interview

• rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

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  • poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

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    • rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

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      • poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

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• rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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 wrong 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?

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  • poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

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    • rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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?

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      • poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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 🤦

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  • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Blocked for bot spam

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