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 peer 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 đ€·ââïž
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.
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 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.
This is not a new feature, it was only renamed from "unlisted" to "quiet public", and setting bots to that is an entirely reasonable demand, especially if they are only ment for location specific subscriptions.
I agree that on a 12k user instance the local feed is less useful (and that the instance is way too big), but this is probably why they are especially "anal" about bot spam making it even worse.
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 đ€Š
The 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.
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 đ
Edit: finished reading the article... good riddance that they are gone. What a self-centered and toxic person đ€Š
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.
We used to have an equivalent on our instance, but it was constantly flooded with reply-bros and trans people complaining about the name, so we archived it as no women was willing to moderate it (for understandable reasons).
I find Cheogram and Monocles to be good looking and featureful clients, so not sure what exactly you mean. They are certainly not any worse than WhatsApp, Threema or Signal in that regard.
On iOS I agree though... Monal is not bad per se, but it needs some work on the UI side of things.
Technically it is possible, and I have heard rumors about some eastern European providers given unique public IPs on request, but practically no, not possible/available.
For public services you will need some kind of tunnel, as cellular networks or Starlink will not provide you with a public IP. Otherwise no big issue with an ARM SBC and a somewhat decent battery.
The main difference is that XMPP (like most other federated systems) is based on passing messages, so if a new server joins a chat, it gets send messages from that point onwards.
In Matrix that is different. When a new server joins a chat it exchanges the entire database for that chat, and for DAG consistency reasons this means all the metadata since the chat was first created, often years ago.
Matrix is not really a chat system, but rather a distributed database that pretends to be a chat system. As a result all servers participating in a room get a full copy of the room metadata all the way back to when the room was created, which is a serious privacy issue.
This is not a general problem of federated systems though, and XMPP for example basically only shares the metadata that other participating servers strictly need to function.
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 peer 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 đ€·ââïž
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.