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

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[–] rglullis 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (26 children)

This leads to burnout of the volunteers, over-streched infrastructure and people that soon leave again because someone lied to them about what the Fediverse is.

You don't need to tell me that the community-funded model is broken. I'm saying that for years already.

But there are two separate forces at play, here. Yes, there is this aspect of not having enough infrastructure and not enough manpower to support a larger group of users (which I agree, though I think it's entirely self-inflicted) but there is also this strong cultural aspect of Fedi that equates being on the fringe as "cool" and that actively pushes Fedi to be a tiny, niche space that should be treated as some sort of secret club to keep the plebs away.

For this crowd, even if OP was running the bots on their own server, they would still be met with scorn because "they are using a microblog to send notifications". It's this culture that is pathetic. It's this culture that pushes "normies" away, and if we don't change this culture then there is no amount of funding or goodwill that will make Fedi a nice, fun, appealing place.

You can’t put a Mc Donalds sign in front of a farmers market and expect that will magically bring customers and solve all of the farmers market’s funding issues.

This here is not a farmers market. I wish this was a farmers market. People don't go to a farmers market and tell the farmer they only need to cover the cost of the feed in order to get a whole chicken like people do here. No, sir. This is a soup kitchen where everyone pretends to be homeless in order to fit in.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 week ago (25 children)

To quote from one of your links:

Funding is like oxygen. Organisms that do not have circulatory systems can only grow to the size of insects.

Yet insects are by far the most populous group of animals on earth and often excell in cooperation and some form huge meta-organisms.

If the idea that drives the Fediverse wants to succeed we need to build 60.000 volunteer run Pixelfed etc. instances, and that is not an unrealistic number at all, but it takes time.

You can't shortcut this process with more funding and commercial companies, because if you try, you end up with something completely different and most likely with another monopoly.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

You're arguing with a right-libertarian, FYI. This should explain some of their positions and arguments better.

[–] rglullis 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

a right-libertarian

You have no idea how wrong you are, but if this is what you need to believe to sleep at night, I won't be able or interested in changing your mind.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago

If it quacks like a duck, and it walks like a duck...

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