a remote instance (...) would not show up on the local feed, and (...) subscribed to would show up on the federated timeline.

Not only the distinction between local/federated timeline is completely irrelevant for most people, the whole concept of "timelines" only exist because the system does not provide an efficient global discovery mechanism.

And just by trying to explain this, we've lost like 90% of the potential user base.

And to make it worse, you think that people need to think about all of this when onboarding?

the system working as intended and defending itself against abuse.

No, this is way for individual nodes to protect themselves, but the idea of protection here only counts for the admins.

If people want to subscribe to bot spam they can start their own instance

No, they will just go back to the social media platforms that gives them what they want without getting judged by it.

or register directly on alien.top.

Why would they register on alien.top, when the largest "organic instances" defederated from it and effectively removed any chance of making it attractive for real people that were looking for a "soft" migration?

Average Familiarity

^xkcd

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.

if all you want is to recreate the corporate social media 1:1 then indeed Bluesky is the better place to be.

What a lame, lazy and self-righteous cop-out!

I am not talking about "recreating corporate social media". I am saying that the culture here is completely broken. It is dominated by this loud reactionary group of people who think of themselves of oh-so-welcoming and oh-so-progressive, but that takes any newcomer and shoves them away at the slight deviation of the current norms. And now that someone has come and writes an honest critique, your defense mechanism is to call them toxic?

Infrastructure does not magically appear, and the Fediverse does not have deep VC funded pockets to just make it so.

If only we managed to be just a little bit more appealing to the masses, so that we could have an actual ecosystem with a healthy economy then we wouldn't need to depend on VC pockets and we would be able to serve everyone. All we need is to find a way to attract some of those who looked our way and we can then show how we can have a fun place without depending on Big Tech, right?

But no, apparently the "right thing to do" is to create division over the most ridiculous things (bots posting every 14 minutes! To an instance of 12k users! Blasphemy!) and further pigeonholing us into the "The Fediverse is only for weirdos and social pariahs" territory.

I am not expecting you to have a full "are we the baddies?" realization, but hol-li-eey shit when I find myself in arguments like these I lose another slice of hope on the Fediverse as a healthy universal alternative to the web.

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.

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.

Community is not enough

They can invite to join the party, but you are still going to need those nasty capitalists to fill your cup

^{Raphael Lullis}

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.

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

I once had this conversation with some other "indie entrepreneur" who was arguing something along the lines of "I don't care about VC funding because my competitors all come and go, and my business still endures." When I asked "Does this mean that you can make out a living out of your business?" and his response was "no, but I have a full time job, so my business is default alive"

He wasn't too happy when I pointed out (a) he had a hobby, not a business and (b) cockroaches are also optimized for survival, but outlasting your competitors mean jack shit if they are playing a different ball game. He spent all this time pretending to have a business while his competition was actually out there fighting for customers.

All of this to say: there is no consolation in being "right" in my death bed. I am not interested in something that "takes time" if in the mean time my kids are growing up in a world dominated by Big Tech. Anyone who understands how bad Big Tech is bad for society should be rushing and actively accelerating to build an alternative.

commercial companies (...) end up with something completely different and most likely with another monopoly.

It's is basically impossible to create a monopoly around FOSS services. It's a commodity with high R&D costs but zero cost to distribute and replicate. You can only jack up the prices of commodities if you collude with your competitors or create a cartel.

The main thing holding back the development of a healthy cottage industry of hosting providers, consulting services, app customization, etc is not the Big Tech players, but precisely this "culture" of people expecting services for free.

There are plenty of examples of monopolies built on FOSS technology. Especially in social media it is more about network effects and having enough funds to buy up any potential competitors. Facebook could be FOSS and it would not change anything.

The culture to expect this for "free" is not exclusive to the fediverse, and while it has been exploited by adtech companies to build large surveillance advertisement monopolies, it is by itself not wrong for people to expect that basic services are not held behind a paywall. It just needs another organisational model to function, and comercialisation is not going to work.

And besides those general considerations, your healty cottage industry is a pipe dream. Digital services have a fundamentally different economic basis that leads to huge efficiency gains at scale. If you do not actively work against that, any cottage industry will quickly consolidate around a few big players and you will basically have replicated the current system.

examples of monopolies built on FOSS technology.

Citation needed?

I have no doubt that you point out some markets and see a large corporation dominating it. But a de facto monopoly? Not so much.

your healty cottage industry is a pipe dream.

I'm sure you know that there are plenty of small businesses making a living out of email hosting, even if Google and MS account for 80% of the market.

In pretty much the same way that lots of local business just ditched their own web pages to go to Facebook, but this didn't kill all the other website builders companies out there.

these companies are at the whim of the large oligopolies

Why? We are talking about FOSS and services based on FOSS, here. Do you think that Google would be able to successfully shut down small email providers without repercussions?

pose absolutely no threat to them

Why is that relevant? I do not particularly care about eliminating the large corporations, at least not from the start. I'd be more than happy if we could grow this ecosystem here to become a sizable share of the overall market.

I'd rather work towards a world where Facebook has "only" 70% of the market to themselves and the rest of us foment a healthy economy sustaining the other 30%, than to keep this delusional idea that a scrappy bunch of nerds are going to be able to take Lemmy/Mastodon/PixelFed/Matrix/XMPP to the mainstream by wishful thinking and "community" alone.

Many of these email providers only exist as a less bad alternative but compatible with Gmail etc. And the oligopol could shut them down any time as their primary service is sending emails to the oligopol.

What you are proposing is basically to make the Fediverse a small managed opposition to Meta's Threads, which I am sure Zuckerberg would love.

But that is not what the Fediverse tries to be and neither does it aim to become mainstream. We are doing prefigurative infrastructure building here. If people want to join, great. If not, also no problem. But if society decides to finally get rid of this capitalist hellscape, then the Fediverse will be there and ready to use.

I disagree about "the primary service" of a minority provider. The minority provider can do a lot more than just "send" emails to the larger share, and I think they can be instrumental for us to bring a tool from the intolerant minorities to the mainstream.

I also disagree about the idea of "managed opposition". "Managed opposition" is what Mozilla does to Google with Firefox. They are paid by Google to be kept around. I am not saying that we should take the Fediverse and seek funding from Threads, or for us to depend on Facebook.

Finally, I have serious doubts that this "prefigurative infrastructure building" is effective. To me it seems like just a collective of aimless rebels who want to keep this universe secluded from everyone else, but it's just too afraid to say it out loud.

Anyway, thanks for the chat. I understand I won't be able to change your mind, but to go back to the original topic: I just wish that next time we don't see someone as "toxic" just because they were not willing to put up with all these silly rules and rituals that everyone seems to follow without questioning.

The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority

How Europe will eat Halal — Why you don’t have to smoke in the smoking section — Your food choices on the fall of the Saudi king –How to prevent a friend from working too hard –Omar Sharif ‘s…

^{Nassim Nicholas Taleb (INCERTO)}

I just wish that next time we don’t see someone as “toxic” just because they were not willing to put up with all these silly rules and rituals that everyone seems to follow without questioning.

Something, something Chestertons fence...

These "rituals" are vital for the continued existence of the Fediverse. Without a clear anti-capitalist and anti-oligopolist stance it will be co-opted and destroyed like many similar efforts that came before. You are being very naive if you can't see that.

Without a clear anti-capitalist and anti-oligopolist stance it will be co-opted and destroyed

With this continued "anti-capitalist" stance there will never be anything to be destroyed. Without real investment and resources, this will be forever nothing more than a castle made of sand.

You sound like a reverse Tankie 😅 No proof of anything other than your ortodox economic believes, and when confronted with the living proof of the opposite (the Fediverse) you just claim that it can't and will never exist 🤦

Millions of people are using it every month, and it seems to do just fine despite contstant claims since many years that it can't survive...

"Millions of people", let's round it up to 10 million, ok?

Instagram reports 2 billion active users. TikTok reports 1.5 billion, Facebook reports 3 billion. So, the Fediverse as a whole gets maybe to reach 0.6% of the major networks.

Do you want compare only with the Threadiverse with Reddit? Let's be again be generous here and round it up to 60k MAU. Reddit is reporting around 75 million MAU. So, even if we consider that Reddit is lying like crazy and that 2/3 of the users on Reddit are fake, Reddit is ~400 times larger.

This is cockroach levels of usage.

Yes, the Fediverse will survive. But it doesn't mean that it ever was relevant.