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

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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

  • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
    1·
    7 days ago

    There’s a difference between an instance trying to duplicate all of fucking reddit

    • There were fewer than 200 subreddits being mirrored. This is far from “all of reddit”.
    • Some of them were also mirroring comments, but the large majority was post-only.
    • I was implementing a bunch of filters to bring the noise down.
    • The bots from alien.top were posting only to instances that I also own.
    • No content was being pushed out. If the content from alien.top was ending up on your instance, it was because your users were interested in the content.
    • Even after I disabled most of the bots (I think that now it’s only mirroring stuff to sfw.community), the ban on the instance persisted.

    With botsin.space, we have a good example of what is reasonable to not be defederated

    We also have a good example of an instance that is dead. There is no point in giving that as an example, if no one can actually use it.