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rglullis
rglullis @ rglullis @communick.news
Posts
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1,812
Joined
2 yr. ago

Mastodon Exit Interview

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  • 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?

    • Mastodon Exit Interview

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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

    Each one of them, no exceptions, shows a different systemic failure with the Fediverse.

    • Mastodon Exit Interview

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  • 4 posts per hour on an instance with 12 thousand active users, and the only reason the mas.to admin found to complain about it is "it pollutes the local timeline".

    I'm sorry, this is beyond stupid. The bot was not abusing any hashtags, the bots were split among different locations precisely to make them relevant only for the people in a certain location. Yeah, OP could've changed the bots to "quiet public" listing, but (a) this is a new "feature" from Mastodon and (b) relevant only for people who are anal about the "local timeline", which in an instance of 12 thousand people is as useful as any random firehose.

    • Mastodon Exit Interview

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  • You really made me look...

    There are 98 bots, each one was posting exactly once a day. That's an average of one post every 14 minutes.

    • Mastodon Exit Interview

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  • I guess you are (like the parent I responded to) too hung up on a technicality and missing the forest for the trees.

    You can bet that even if OP decided to use his own instance to run the bots, there would be admins that would find reason to complain. Why would I be so sure of that? Because that's exactly what happened with alien.top.

    Like any "exit interview" or "break up talk", the exact reasons that make someone leave the platform is not the real signal. The real signal to me here is that ActivityPub had one person interested in building stuff (doesn't matter if they are good or not), they were completely unwelcomed about it, and then they decided to move on to Bluesky.

    Do you think that the Bluesky people are going to be nagging OP with this stupid "you can't have fun here!" mentality? At the end of the day, where do you think newcomers will be more interested in trying out stuff? In our playground or on Bluesky's?

    • Mastodon Exit Interview

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  • 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?

    • Mastodon Exit Interview

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  • Good Lord, you must be fun at parties.

    • Ditch the DIY Drama: Why Use Fedify Instead of Building ActivityPub from Scratch?

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  • Imagine you want to write a competitor to PostgreSQL

    That's a complete apple/oranges comparison. Fedify is an application framework.

    Try "Imagine you want to write a competitor to {Mastodon/PixelFed/Lemmy/PieFed/Pleroma/WriteFreely}", and see where your analogy takes you.

    • We should create a Floptok-like community/instance on lemmy

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  • What is floptok?

    Yeah, I looked online, still don't understand.

    • Lemmy vote aggregation idea

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  • It won't stop the people interested in doing mass-manipulation of votes. There is no virtual difference between a bot that votes through Lemmy and a bot that votes through "pure" ActivityPub.

    • Lemmy vote aggregation idea

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  • No crazy scheme like this will work, because creating any form of anonymous account is super easy.

    What we need is to add a layer of trust assignment and authorization system based on reputation, like what Fediseer does but built-in into the application. Then we can quarantine new users, contain their actions until the admin gives explicit approval, auto reject follows if they don't have at least N trusted people vouching for them, etc...

    • Lemmy vote aggregation idea

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  • Creating a fake instance to send out votes is cheaper and easier that you think. You need only one domain and a script.

    • Instances for Portuguese and / or Italian speakers?

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    • Permanently Deleted

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    • What features are missing from piefed, or, why aren't we reccommending piefed instead of lemmy?

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  • Migrating the images as in media? The discussion is about database sizes.

    The biggest DB I have is the one from alien.top, which got close to deal with 600k mirrored bots and 10M posts + comments. The database was clocking around 25GB.

    • What features are missing from piefed, or, why aren't we reccommending piefed instead of lemmy?

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  • ActivityPub C2S is not the the solution. It still requires a server and it still keeps the admins in control of everything.

    ActivityPods seems to be going in the right direction, though...

    • What features are missing from piefed, or, why aren't we reccommending piefed instead of lemmy?

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  • How many people like you are using PieFed right now?

    • What features are missing from piefed, or, why aren't we reccommending piefed instead of lemmy?

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  • 360 currently

    Please, read things in context. I'm talking about moderators.

    Are all the 360 PieFed users also community moderators?

    • What features are missing from piefed, or, why aren't we reccommending piefed instead of lemmy?

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  • And by doing so, it makes it available only for moderators with accounts on piefed. What is the current TAM? 20 people?

    A separate tool could connect to any server federating "Report" activities. What is the current TAM? Any moderator of a group, no matter if their account is on Lemmy/PieFed/PixelFed/Misskey/Mastodon...

    • What features are missing from piefed, or, why aren't we reccommending piefed instead of lemmy?

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  • "moderation duties" and "regular participants" in a forum system have such different use cases, it makes no sense to try to make it work with the software itself.

    It would be better/faster/easier to simply build a separate tool that can be useful for moderators, instead of trying to shoehorn it in the existing API. But I don't really think that this is something that really bothers people enough, given that last time I asked if I could get 20 people interested to sponsor the development of the moderation tool, and to this day only one person showed up.