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   Rob Shearer (rvcx@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 02:53:13 JST Rob Shearer

   • trumpet@mas.to

   The instance administered by @trumpet that hosts all of my Mastodon solar bots (https://v.cx/2024/02/solar-bot) has stated their intention to ban all of my bots. Although they concede that neither the accounts nor the posts break any of their rules, they don't like that the posts appear in their instance's timeline. If there were a way to remove posts *only* from the instance feed I'd agree to that. There is not. Instead, posts would also need to be unsearchable, suppressing their discovery.

   • Embed this notice
     Ross Andrews (randrews@somewhy.net)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 02:53:12 JST Ross Andrews

     in reply to

     @rvcx Have you thought about hosting your own instance to operate the bots in? I host an instance, it's not hard.

     You Get Glee likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Rob Shearer (rvcx@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 02:53:13 JST Rob Shearer

     in reply to

     I find the Mastodon obsession with curation of both instance and hashtag timelines a symptom of a broken Mastodon culture: if *you* don't want to see certain content, then that content should be less available to *anyone*. Combine this with Mastodon's failure to offer any way to filter timelines based on the copious metadata available (every account is tagged as a bot, and every post is tagged with the specific bot posting to them all) and "that content shouldn't exist" becomes endemic.

   • Embed this notice
     Rob Shearer (rvcx@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 02:53:13 JST Rob Shearer

     in reply to

     • trumpet@mas.to

     In short, @trumpet will soon ban all the https://v.cx/2024/02/solar-bot Mastodon bots, and I must accept that my model of micro-posting is incompatible with Mastodon culture. Analogous bots will continue to operate on BlueSky, which does not suppress content for the crime of being targeted to tiny populations.

   • Embed this notice
     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 12:23:52 JST pistolero

     in reply to

     • Ross Andrews
     @randrews @rvcx It's kind of pointless to complain that someone doesn't want to host some spambots, but if you actually do want to see when the sun comes up or goes down, you can find that out for a given lat/long years in advance. It's trivial.
     
     https://github.com/risacher/sunwait
     https://plan9.io/magic/man2html/7/astro
     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Rob Shearer (rvcx@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 12:23:53 JST Rob Shearer

     in reply to

     • Ross Andrews

     @randrews Don't even get my started on my *technical* critiques of Mastodon. The "federation" model doesn't really work.

   • Embed this notice
     Ross Andrews (randrews@somewhy.net)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 12:23:53 JST Ross Andrews

     in reply to

     @rvcx Yeah, it doesn't take much to trigger people to instance-block you. It sucks, federation doesn't work if people intentionally break it.

     And yeah that commenter is an asshole. Well, if the bots go to bluesky, I'm guessing somewhy.net is blocked there so I won't see them any more. Bummer!

   • Embed this notice
     Ross Andrews (randrews@somewhy.net)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 12:23:54 JST Ross Andrews

     in reply to

     @rvcx I can't see that link, it's a 404 for me

   • Embed this notice
     Ross Andrews (randrews@somewhy.net)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 12:23:55 JST Ross Andrews

     in reply to

     @rvcx
     > (exemplified by the first reply to this announcement)

     Dunno what to tell you man, I was trying to help. I follow the Houston bot and will be sorry to see it go.

   • Embed this notice
     Rob Shearer (rvcx@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 12:23:55 JST Rob Shearer

     in reply to

     • Ross Andrews

     @randrews I was referring to https://mastodon.social/@Trevorgoodchild/114230256459431744

   • Embed this notice
     Rob Shearer (rvcx@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 12:23:56 JST Rob Shearer

     in reply to

     • Ross Andrews

     @randrews Definitely not worth the effort. Honestly I was rather surprised I couldn't find any (mainstream) "bots welcome" instances—ideally that allow programmatic account management instead of the *incredibly* tedious hundred-private-tab workflow I've used to tweak account settings—when I first set these up.

     As it stands, my disappointment in Mastodon as a whole (exemplified by the first reply to this announcement) doesn't leave me with much motivation to bother with an instance migration.

   • Embed this notice
     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 14:36:19 JST pistolero

     in reply to

     • Ross Andrews
     @randrews @rvcx
     
     > They aren't spambots;
     
     It was 108 bots posting the sunrise/sunset time to the public timeline.
     
     > If you didn't want to see it, all you had to do was not follow the bot.
     
     For years, TWKN has been periodically swamped by bots. My database is full of botposts. 617GB, a difficult size to manage. There are interesting bots (rare) and then there are bots that repost things from elsewhere (anime girl bots selecting random images from Boorus, bots that repost from Twitter, etc.), and then there are bots like that "Hourly CET" bot that used to post an SVG of a clock every hour, on the hour, so that it can live in the database forever.
     
     This was 108 bots that he wanted mas.to to host and didn't want to host himself (he quit rather than just run an instance full of his own bots, which would have solved his complaints with account management), and it posted information that you could work out with a pencil and paper, information that people worked out with giant rock arrangements millennia ago.
     
     I mean, sure, maybe you liked these bots; that's fine. There are bots that just download some hentai from a Booru imageboard and post every 15 minutes and they're wildly popular and the popularity doesn't change whether or not they're spambots.
     lookslikeaspambottome.png
     prettygood likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Ross Andrews (randrews@somewhy.net)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 14:36:20 JST Ross Andrews

     in reply to

     • pistolero

     @p @rvcx They aren't spambots; they were providing a useful service (useful to me anyway). I know I have alternate ways to get it (it's one of the functions of my watch) but I liked getting it from the bot, which is why I followed the bot. If you didn't want to see it, all you had to do was not follow the bot.

   • Embed this notice
     Encyclopædia Autistica (Order Now!) (mrsaturday@shitposter.world)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 15:15:22 JST Encyclopædia Autistica (Order Now!)

     in reply to

     • Ross Andrews
     • pistolero
     @p @rvcx @randrews Expecting an admin to host 108 bots that spew mundane information like that and not ask permission is quite the dick move. All of this could have been solved via self-hosting, but it's easier to have a normal one on main and spirit away to BlueCry with all of the other perennially angry types Mastodon tends to attract.
     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 15:16:32 JST pistolero

     in reply to

     • Ross Andrews
     • Encyclopædia Autistica (Order Now!)
     @mrsaturday @randrews @rvcx I'm convinced that the ousting of Jack Dorsey and the "NO INCELS" billboards mean that those people are being funneled.
   • Embed this notice
     Ross Andrews (randrews@somewhy.net)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 16:14:34 JST Ross Andrews

     in reply to

     • Encyclopædia Autistica (Order Now!)
     • pistolero

     @mrsaturday @p @rvcx If he didn't ask permission to run them there first, that does make a difference, sure. And I suggested to him that he should just self-host them, which he wouldn't do. So yeah, kind of an unserious person. Depends on your definition of "spam" I guess; I wouldn't consider them spam.

     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 22:19:46 JST pistolero

     in reply to

     • Ross Andrews
     • Encyclopædia Autistica (Order Now!)
     @randrews @mrsaturday @rvcx Reasonable. I don't hate that bots like this exist, but quitting because someone else didn't want to host 108 bots and then writing a screed about how fedi sucks is kind of an asshole maneuver. Aside from that, he's on here how long, and still calls fedi "Mastodon": it makes me think the guy wasn't ever really here.
     
     I don't know where you are but here are the next ten years of sunrises and sunsets in Los Angeles, per astro(1).
     
     "gkrellm Sun" is old-ish but still compiles and works: https://gkrellsun.sourceforge.net/ . It even draws the apogee; here's a screenshot. I think a slightly less spammy bot might do something cool like that. But I think it's better to have that kind of thing in the UI than a constant stream of messages.
     
     There's also "pom" in BSD games, but that's for the moon rather than the sun.
     iamrunningit.png
     next-ten-years.txt