Do you think that the content is only valuable if you can interact with it?

I specifically didn’t say that. Interaction is the obvious part in a human vs bot debate, but to me it also makes a difference if a human decided to post something somewhere, or if a bot is copying it without the human’s consent. If I’d just wanted posts I’d use an automated news aggregator instead.

Should we just forget about books because it doesn’t have a comment section?

We are talking about social media here, nothing in what I said applies to or takes away from books.

That can only possibly be true […]

Just pointing out that you’re trying to argue away my personal experience. I specifically didn’t say that this is a general rule, I said it’s how I experience it. But judging by the feedback to my post I’m not alone with this.

This is the same type of gatekeeping […]

This is by definition not gatekeeping, because I’m not trying to keep anybody out. People can come here for whatever reason as far as I’m concerned. What I said was that we should not change things specifically to try to attract people who mainly search for the biggest possible audience, and that is what you’re doing. Big difference.

I haven’t been able to implement the solution as fast I’d like […]

That’s why I suggested to you a few weeks ago that you keep it small until you ironed out the kinks, idk if you remember. Experiments like yours are completely fine imo, as long as you make sure they don’t negatively affect the wider Lemmy community. But what you’ve been doing could be described as a full-scale bot attack on the Fediverse, and an excuse like that just doesn’t cut it in that case.

But if you know that the post is from a bot who potentially will become a real user (by migrating through the fediverser portal) and that one of the reasons to make it more compelling to them is by having content here that is not available elsewhere, why not write anyway?

My goal - as I said in the beginning - is not to help you with your project! I come here to interact with real humans right now. What you are doing is deputize other Lemmy users for your plan, even if that means making their experience here worse. They didn’t sign up for this, apparently many even disagree with it like I do, but you just don’t seem to care or at least accept it as a necessary sacrifice on their part!

It helps if you stop thinking about them as “bots” […]

I’m sorry, but you can’t shit in my mouth and tell me “It helps if you stop thinking about it as shit, instead think of it as chocolate cake”. Idk what fantasy world you managed to argue yourself into, but they are bots right now! As I said, it doesn’t matter that they are impersonating real humans, if anything it makes it even worse. And I don’t share your blind optimism for this project of yours, so that doesn’t change things either.

[…] alien.top has reached top 5 in status count in less than two months.

Because you are faking statistics with bots! Please get this in your head for gods sake! I can create an instance with 100000000 fake users and posts with the push of a button, that doesn’t create any real user engagement or value.

If alien.top ever becomes minimally popular, it will be the people on LW that will be in the minority and they will be the ones missing out on content, not the other way around.

What kind of f*cked up plan is that? You want your instances to become more popular than LW and split the majority Lemmy community in two? Do you actually read what you write?

I hope that it doesn’t get to that point, but if I have to sacrifice alien.top in order to keep the idea of fediverser and the topic-based instances intact, I will.

Great, so you just keep bombarding Lemmy with bots, and you don’t care if you harm it in the process. And the people who already signed up through those burned instances just get thrown under the bus.

Honestly, it seems to me like you’re so full of yourself or obsessed with your plan that you don’t actually realize the consequences of your actions anymore. Jurassic Park comes to mind: “Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”.