Comment on Mastodon Exit Interview
poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 week agoThe 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.
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?
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 🤦
rglullis@communick.news 1 week ago
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
All of them, no exceptions, show a failure of the Fediverse.
db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Botsin.space existed for a long while and wasn’t widely defederated. Just saying…
poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
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 if I remember correctly 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.