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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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- poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  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 thinks their specific bots are harmless.
  
  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.
  
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  - rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    
    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 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 the this culture then there is no amount of funding or goodwill that will make the Fedi a nice, fun, place.
    
    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.
    
    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.
    
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    poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    To quote from one of your links:
    
    Funding is like oxygen. Organisms that do not have circulatory systems can only grow to the size of insects.
    
    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.
    
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