http://v.cx/2025/04/mastodon-exit-interview

> it's become increasing clear that Mastodon isn't, and won't ever be, a good platform for "asynchronous ephemeral notifications of any kind". I'd also argue (more controversially) that it's simply not good infrastructure for social networking of any kind.

Okay, so you were a BotMaster and the bots' home instance required that they not appear on the public timeline. You were somehow unable to find them on MastoSoc, so to you that means no one else could find them. Even though there have been bots on the Fediverse that were cool to interact with (ask a Fediverse old-timer about @x11r5), the overwhelming majority are annoying as heck. So I agree with your instance admin that they shouldn't appear in public timelines ... but only in the timelines of those who subscribe to--follow--the bot account. But if you wanted to see the bots' posts, you could have followed from your own account.

> [Mastodon] will never offer the fun of early Twitter, let alone the vibrancy of Twitter during its growth phase.

Mastodon is a subset of the Fediverse, not the whole thing. As recently as a year or two ago, there were segments that were nearly as fun as early Twitter. But most of them didn't have many Mastodon users. But as a frustrated BotMaster, you're not really interested in fun. You're interested in getting people to see your bots' posts. Let's talk about that.

How do you inform people about something that you think may interest some of them without offending everyone else? That sounds like the problem of every sales & marketing team in the world. I'll bet you can find some advice by entering your question into a search engine. This ( https://www.strikingly.com/blog/posts/10-clever-social-media-engagement-tactics-greater-reach ) isn't specific to your situation, but I expect that most of it applies. If you want traffic to your bots, most of the Fediverse doesn't have Twitter-style follow suggestions, so you have to do the work to attract attention to your bots and their posts.

Okay, so what about Twitter's former "vibrancy" ? Honestly, I don't know what you're talking about. Twitter was fun in 2006, still somewhat enjoyable by 2009, and an absolute dungpit by 2012, which is when I basically stopped posting there. I'm not sure which growth years you mean. I remember using Flock browser's social posting tool along with TTYtter. There were lots of others, but most were focused on the needs of those we now call "influencers", so I didn't want them.

> Mastodon is an instantiation of an open standard called ActivityPub, which was built mainly in reaction to Facebook's closed ecosystem.

No, not really. Most AP Fediverse software, like most OStatus Fediverse software before it, was built around the capabilities of Twitter at the time. The ActivityPub standard is more capable than that, but most implementations are rather conservative because they want to remain compatible with the most-used implementation, Mastodon.

> I'm not saying federation "won't" work or "can't" work. Merely that in 2025, nine years after deployment, federation does not work for the Mastodon use case.

> I could opine at length about possible federated architectures and what I think the ActivityPub people clearly got wrong in hindsight.1 But the proof is in the pudding: Mastodon simply doesn't show users the posts they ask to see, as I quickly learned from my collection of bots.

The posts someone asks to see are the posts available by following the other poster or adding them to a list. If you didn't follow (and encourage others to follow) your own bots, you're blaming others for your own failings. If you follow the bots, your instance would express its interest on your behalf.

But what is the Mastodon use case, in your opinion? I'd be interested in hearing about it.

One might say "Federation does not work" if one got hit with FediBlock, because for that person's uses, it wouldn't work. No one sees posts, no one interacts or engages with posts. No one says "I want to see more of this, I'm going to follow". But the article explains that you didn't do the work of promoting your bots to others who might enjoy them. In this case, it wasn't federation but the sales & marketing team for your bots that wasn't working.

> Account migration does not work

> One of the big selling points of Mastodon was that you can pick which instance your account lives on, but it is easy to change your mind and switch to a different instance later on. This feature was wildly oversold.

> Mastodon allows you to post the equivalent of a web redirect: your followers are informed of your new instance and seamlessly migrated over. Your posts, however, do not move with you. Which is kind of a theme: the system simply doesn't think posts are terribly important.

There are other possible ways it could be handled, but in a server-based network, one is always going to run up against certain things, including different server rules, different admin capabilities & skills, and the need to prepare somehow BEFORE a migration from one server to another is needed. Even the RedMatrix / Hubzilla / Zot way of doing things requires one to prepare before the time it would be necessary.