I am currently winding down the Mastodon bots I used to post sunrise and sunset times. The precipitating event is that the admin of the instance hosting the associated accounts demanded they be made nigh-undiscoverable, but the underlying cause is that it’s become increasing clear that Mastodon isn’t, and won’t ever be, a good platform for “asynchronous ephemeral notifications of any kind”. I’d also argue (more controversially) that it’s simply not good infrastructure for social networking of any kind. There are lots of interesting people using Mastodon, and I’m sure it will live on as a good-enough space for certain niche groups. But there is no question that it will never offer the fun of early Twitter, let alone the vibrancy of Twitter during its growth phase. I’ve long since dropped Mastodon from my home screen, and have switched to Bluesky for text-centric social media.

I am currently winding down the Mastodon bots I used to post sunrise and sunset times. The precipitating event is that the admin of the instance hosting the associated accounts demanded they be made nigh-undiscoverable, but the underlying cause is that it’s become increasing clear that Mastodon isn’t, and won’t ever be, a good platform for “asynchronous ephemeral notifications of any kind”. I’d also argue (more controversially) that it’s simply not good infrastructure for social networking of any kind. There are lots of interesting people using Mastodon, and I’m sure it will live on as a good-enough space for certain niche groups. But there is no question that it will never offer the fun of early Twitter, let alone the vibrancy of Twitter during its growth phase. I’ve long since dropped Mastodon from my home screen, and have switched to Bluesky for text-centric social media

…

Federation does not work I’m not saying federation “won’t” work or “can’t” work. Merely that in 2025, nine years after deployment, federation does not work for the Mastodon use case.

I could opine at length about possible federated architectures and what I think the ActivityPub people clearly got wrong in hindsight.1 But the proof is in the pudding: Mastodon simply doesn’t show users the posts they ask to see, as I quickly

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    11·
    13 days ago

    So they are complaining that their bots would be invisible, because on Twitter the algorithm would down-rank such bot spam hard and have the same effect? That person clearly has no clue what they are talking about and just wants to abuse a public instance for their pet project 🙄

    Edit: finished reading the article… good riddance that they are gone. What a self-centered and toxic person 🤦

  • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
    11·
    13 days ago

    I’m really not sure that a microblogging platform is the right channel for sunrise and sunset times in the first place. Personally if I wanted that info, I’d go look up a table. But you’re always welcome to host your own instance, if you want to (ab)use the protocol like this.

      • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1·
        13 days ago

        Eh? They were flooding the local timeline with bot posts for sunset etc times for many different locations, meaning likely several bot posts per hour edit: looking at the actual list of locations it was probably one per minute or so. That would get them banned on pretty much any instance.

        By their words: “Not worth the effort” to run your own instance my ass… don’t abuse a gratis public service with bot spam.

        • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
          1·
          13 days 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 the wrong governance 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?