rglullis

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.

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?

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?

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.

If you want, I can create a community at https://level-up.zone/.

Their justification is that pre v1.0, you can break whatever you want whenever you want.

They are not wrong. If you are developing an application against a backend that clearly states "we are following semver. This version is not 1.0, therefore no API is guaranteed to be stable", and you go on to write a client for it anyway, you don't get to complain later when they make breaking changes.

Alternatively, you can just stop relying on their ad-hoc APIs and push for them to implement Lemmy with focus on the ActivityPub API. That is already an standard and if you come up to them with issues against their AP implementation, they will be a lot more likely to listen to you.

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.

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...

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

Another Italian one: https://diggita.com/

It's public information available for instance admins and any sufficiently motivated person who knows a bit about the ActivityPub protocol.