Mastodon will still be there when this one burns down too
True, but unless they have a solution to the bot problem blsky is having and reddit has…
They won’t fair any better…
More moderators and admins
Bsky has block lists and subscriptions to different moderation services labelers (that anyone can run) and you can pick and choose.
This is honestly an amazing feature. I hope someone can implement it in fediverse.
Yup, organic growth
Hopefully the Mastodon devs are paying attention to the features that bsky has that they don’t, and actually copy them rather than sit there and tell everyone that no, they’re wrong they don’t want that feature.
I want to like Mastodon (or any platforms that are federated with them and trying very hard to be them) but they’re utter and total lack of interest in and development of features the community keeps asking for is going to keep it a niche option for weirdos while people keep hopping into corpo social platform after corpo social platform.
The mastodon developers are us.
It’s open source so yeah…my PRS are part of the community. And so are yours. And projects like GoToSocial make it seemless if someone wants to implement the same protocol in a slightly different way.
That’s really not how it works, especially in regards to what OP is referring to. Anyone can offer contributions to mastodon, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be accepted. Mastodon has an organization and that organizations has opinions on what should and shouldn’t be implemented. For example, Mastodon doesn’t federate favorites, so you only see the amount of favorites a post has recieved from your own interest. I’d like for this to be changed, and I could submit a PR to do so, but it wouldn’t be accepted.
Pretty much this, which leads to a bajillion different forks and similar-but-not-quite alternatives that have some neat features but lack others, which your instance of choice probably won’t ever migrate to and which all risk being abandoned by the single person that decides to work on it.
Just to give a taste of forks - https://codeberg.org/fediverse/delightful-fediverse-apps/issues/47
The mastodon devs decide what to merge, though. If they don’t see the value of a feature, they won’t merge it.
If you want to extend the protocol, sure, go ahead. But you’ll be alone on it, since no one outside of your protocol island can use that specific feature.
inb4 “it’s not my job to contribute to a community project when there’s a slick corporate alternative” which is basically just saying “it’s not my job to make the world a better place.” (Actually that’s everyone’s job, all the time.)
“Wahhhh, I shouldn’t have to learn to code, or garden, or be a street medic, or learn to do anything to take care of other people ever. I should have it all spoon-fed to me by corporations that don’t give a fuck if I live or die!”
And yet there are somehow those of us who have the audacity to call Boomers lazy and entitled. We’re obviously no fucking better.
this is an architecture problem.
a new architecture needs to be implemented that would make it impossible for bots to [not] even use the tools, and if they do block them at the source.
verified identities using government id schemes, loads already exist, i verified my account on LinkedIn for free
How do you propose such an architecture works?
probably start with no public API that uses something like a csrf token.
then leverage the patterns that companies combating adblock use and make the page source so spaghetti that anything like beautifulsoup couldn’t use it.
at that point you would have to track fluctuations in user actions, rather the lack of. if a user takes .5 seconds to click an action after a page loads 20 times in an hour flag the account for further surveillance that watches over n days for larger impacting actions like post or activity times. correlate with existing users that are in the same profile range and if they are a match for known bot activity ban the account.
on the flip side, bots may try to randomize interactions to combat this, so another filter may look at long term patterns with repetitive actions. things like adding comments may not be useful, but the way they’re entered may.
how long does it take them to enter the comment into the input form? how many words are they using every comment? are what they are responding to indicative of a response length provided?
for example if the post was, “what’s your favorite cheese?” someone may respond with “Gouda” or “I love Swiss on toasted rye. it reminds me of a lake retreat I had where …” but it would certainly be less than 1000 characters.
as opposed to a post asking about a political opinion that’s nuanced and requires thought and opinion to be shared. not just, “you suck!”
further interactions like upvote/downvote can trigger surveillance. I know some users will dv bomb a user for whatever reason. that could be reason enough to identify them as a malicious entity that’s interfering with the system.
