> When users cannot find or see the posts they explicitly request

Other than server-to-server blocking, like Fediblock, this is not happening. Explicitly request only happens when following the other party or adding them to a list. If that hasn't happened, you haven't explicitly requested their content. I mean, I suppose it is possible that mas.to and mastodon.social are having some spat and you're caught up in it, but other than that, this isn't happening.

> Mastodon was explicitly designed to be anti-viral. The absence of quote tweets in particular was an intentional choice to prevent piling-on, and to avoid the Twitter phenomenon of "the main character of the day" having their life ruined. Such harm reduction is a noble goal, but a social media platform that eschews virality entirely is sterile

The Fediverse is more than Mastodon. Friendica, for example, has had quote posts for years, even before they started to be requested by Mastodon users. If Mastodon doesn't have what you want, see whether one of the other Fediverse servers does have it.

> But more generally, Mastodon culture has taken a scolding, censorious tone. The platform offers a general and open-ended "content warning" infrastructure...meaning that every post can be criticized for not offering enough (or the right) warnings. Both the instance/federated feeds mentioned above and feeds for every hashtag have become curation battlegrounds, with "that content doesn't interest me; stop posting it" not just a normal but a respected view on Mastodon. And the general "we want a space where we, unlike Facebook and Twitter, can punish Nazis" origins of Mastodon have turned a lot of "political discourse" on the platform into a childish game of virtue-signalling one-upsmanship. It is difficult to imagine any of the substantive discussions of the Gaza war that happen on Bluesky surviving on Mastodon.

Again, the Fediverse is more than just Mastodon. I don't see the "substantive discussions ... that happen on Bluesky" because I generally eschew the political posts ("show fewer of this" helps a little, but just like Twitter, if that's what they want to show you, the same post will appear multiple times in your non-chronological discovery feed). Maybe you should try Lemmy ... or Pleroma, Misskey, Friendica, Red Matrix, Hubzilla and look for instances outside the scolding zones.

> Mastodon's main UI allows you to see (some) posts from the accounts you follow, but it also offers several other feeds: you can see all posts from everyone on this instance, or you can see all posts (that your instance happens to receive) from anyone on any instance.

> It should go without saying that both feeds are utter nonsense once there are more than a few thousand users. But because both have pride of place in the UI, new users (in particular) are convinced that they must be useful somehow. And so a culture has developed of complaining about anything that appears in either feed that is considered "noise".

Yeah, I know, you're still sore about people not wanting to see your bots. But if you're the only person who cares to see their content, you're better off running them inside your home network, inaccessible to anyone outside of it.

And yes, if there's a firehose feed, it doesn't take much SGBB [1] to make it overwhelming if it wasn't already.

> I really enjoy Bluesky. It offers much of the best of Twitter: with a well-curated set of follows (and a chronological, not algorithmic timeline), I get to hear directly from a lot of true experts commenting in real time on current events. But I see absolutely no reason to expect the platform to avoid the problems that Twitter encountered as it grew (and Mastodon fostered as it failed to grow). Its own "federated protocol"--literally the entire reason it was built, and the main/only technical pitch in its early days--is totally irrelevant. And the platform's main "we're not like Twitter" features, the "nuclear block" that deletes all (direct) interactions retroactively and its support for blocklists, have led to a "block first, block often" culture that certainly reduces discomfort but also enshrines it as the most echo-chambery of the platforms, even compared with Mastodon. I'd argue that Bluesky has avoided the rancor of late-days Twitter moderation mainly because it hasn't reached anything like the size and diversity of Twitter, and consequently doesn't have the cultural, political, and economic significance for people to work all that hard at ruining it.

See, "I see absolutely no reason to expect the platform to avoid the problems that Twitter encountered as it grew" is a major problem for a platform spun out of Twitter's DNA. They should already know the pain points and which of Twitter's responses solved or failed to solve them. Not that "the answer" will be exactly the same, but they should have an advantage over some guy starting a social site in his garage simply because they know what Twitter went through.

"Its own "federated protocol"--literally the entire reason it was built, and the main/only technical pitch in its early days--is totally irrelevant." This was by choice. They chose to make BlueSky not meaningfully decentralized. That's the big reason they're growing so much right now. They're literally Twitter without Musk ... until the money runs out. The people they're attracting are generally not thinking about the benefits of decentralizing control of a network, so they're fine with it.

When you describe BlueSky as "the most echo-chambery of the platforms", you're not exactly praising it.

> the issue that led to the death of my solar bots: on a server with 100,000 users, 100 bots each posting once a day were deemed to be polluting the instance feed of everybody's posts. I have neither respect nor patience for such idiocy

Let me get this straight. You had 100 bots on one instance? You really should have spun up your own instance for something like that. But, yes, I imagine it was something like this:

-> SunriseBot_Singapore: It is sunrise in Singapore.

A few minutes later:

-> SunriseBot_Kuala_Lampur: It is sunrise in Kuala Lampur

... with the potential for several of them to post at nearly the same time.

Yeah, I don't blame the instance users for demanding your bots not post to the public timeline. But again: if you had anywhere near 100 bots, you really should have been hosting them on your own server or paying someone else to run a server specifically for your bots.

[1] SGBB = Semi Grammatical Bot Babble