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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

All of them, no exceptions, show a failure of the Fediverse.

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db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Botsin.space existed for a long while and wasn’t widely defederated. Just saying…

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- rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Yeah, instead if closed down because it couldn’t support itself. What an amazing alternative you are proposing…
  
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  - db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    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.
    
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    rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    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.
    
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poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

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?

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.

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- rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  
  a remote instance (…) would not show up on the local feed, and (…) subscribed to would show up on the federated timeline.
  
  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?
  
  the system working as intended and defending itself against abuse.
  
  No, this is way for individual nodes to protect themselves, but the idea of protection here only counts for the admins.
  
  If people want to subscribe to bot spam they can start their own instance
  
  No, they will just go back to the social media platforms that gives them what they want without getting judged by it.
  
  or register directly on alien.top.
  
  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?
  
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  - poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    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 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.
    
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    rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    
    if all you want is to recreate the corporate social media 1:1 then indeed Bluesky is the better place to be.
    
    What a lame, lazy and self-righteous cop-out!
    
    I am not talking about “recreating corporate social media”. I am saying is 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.
    
    Infrastructure does not magically appear, and the Fediverse does not have deep VC funded pockets to just make it so.
    
    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.
    
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