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.

Could you explain what makes Calendly different from the hundreds of online calendar solutions that exists and can often be self-hosted? I never used it, so it is hard to make a recommendation for an alternative.

Sorry but lets agree to (fundamentally) disagree.

People coming in with this “who cares what my fun does to others” yolo attitude that assumes volunteer run public services are some sort of free resource up for the taking, are fundamentally at odds with what the Fediverse tries to achieve and extremely toxic to it. This is not a lazy cop out, that is clearly telling people at the door that they seem to have the wrong idea what this is all about. And no, this isn’t only about those nearly 100 bots polluting the local timeline… its about having clear rules against such abuse and not making exceptions because someone with a big ego thinks their specific bots are harmless (spoiler: nearly everyone thinks that of their pet project).

And you are completely wrong if you think this effort can be funded by being “just a little bit more appealing to the masses”. The opposite is the case. 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 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.

The “no-alternative” BS is really tiresome. Of course there are alternatives and plenty of them 🤦‍♂️

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 🤷‍♂️

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 🤦

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.

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 🙄

Edit: finished reading the article… good riddance that they are gone. What a self-centered and toxic person 🤦

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.

The main issue with lemmy-federate is IMHO that it removes on of the main advantages of smaller instances: a instance specific “all” feed that allows to easily discover new communities that other like minded people on your instance subscribe to.

With Lemmy-federate it becomes the same bland mix like on lemmy.world and pretty much useless.

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.

Not a good one 🙄

This is not what anarchism means 🙄 Go back to your ancap hideout.

XMPP is best for that IMHO.

Andrewism just made a nice video on the fundamental myths of our society, which is the same as what Graeber is referring to here.

You know that even Synapse is not following the specs? Basically the specs follow Synapse, often with a huge time lag.

Conduit has been hit by that many times when they tried to follow the specs, just to realize they are outdated and incompatible with Synapse.