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

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    5·
    5 days ago

    Not one for sunset and another one for dawn? But ok, I overestimated it a bit, but 4 posts per hour is still bot spam.

    • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
      23·
      5 days ago

      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.

      • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1·
        5 days ago

        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.