[HN Gopher] RIP botsin.space
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       RIP botsin.space
        
       Author : edent
       Score  : 48 points
       Date   : 2024-10-29 21:18 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (muffinlabs.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (muffinlabs.com)
        
       | tjwds wrote:
       | This is incredibly sad; botsin.space has been a steady stream of
       | joy for me over the years. Here's hoping a bunch of alternatives
       | pop up.
        
         | stavros wrote:
         | What was it?
        
           | acherion wrote:
           | A mastodon instance where bots were welcomed.
        
       | Kye wrote:
       | I've had lots of fun calling it bot sin space. It will be missed.
        
       | darknavi wrote:
       | Federated networks like Mastodon and Lemmy are going to get
       | people well-acquainted with websites shutting down. It's hard
       | work (time, money, etc.) to run these things for people, and
       | people start to really lean on them.
       | 
       | It's almost novel now days getting sucked into something that
       | shuts down. killedbygoogle.com is a meme partly I think because
       | websites shutting down is just so uncommon in areas that we get
       | personally invested in.
       | 
       | I run my own Lemmy instance just for my self and even that can be
       | trying sometimes. I enjoy using it instead of reddit, but one day
       | I will probably shut it down and be sad.
        
         | hifikuno wrote:
         | I, too, ran my own instance. I enjoyed it for some time but
         | I've now moved to the omg.lol ecosystem. I feel that by paying
         | a little money for it that I have a higher chance of the server
         | not shutting down.
        
         | OgsyedIE wrote:
         | Besides the monetary costs of operating small fora there are
         | also significant competence hurdles. Site owners who manage to
         | hit a couple thousand users have to figure out spam handling,
         | automated content moderation (including photoDNA and the
         | required reporting if they host images), registering a DMCA
         | agent with the copyright office, setting up an LLC, assessing
         | their needs for COPPA, GDPR and CCPA, their site's tax
         | situation and anything they may want to do involving employing
         | others (such as T&S) without getting burnt out. The median size
         | for a forum getting its first subpoena is 4,300 users.
         | 
         | Managing all of that is easily learnable in a couple months if
         | they have time, disposable income and few distractions but
         | surprisingly few people who have site management thrust upon
         | them know about these things in advance. To most people who
         | think about running an internet anything the above are unknown
         | unknowns. You can't go looking for things you don't know exist,
         | so burnout is high.
        
       | pietervdvn wrote:
       | RIP!
       | 
       | Thanks for hosting this all those years. I'll try to find a new
       | home for my bot.
        
       | shadowgovt wrote:
       | Safe travels to a known name.
       | 
       | One of the reasons I maintain a node with only one user is I fear
       | the day I'll be responsible for other people's social media
       | presence; I could easily see myself going "It's just a few
       | thousand users" and the next thing I know I'm asking whether I
       | can keep this thing going (and agonizing over what it'll do to my
       | users to cut the service). And unlike Colin, I despise Rails and
       | wouldn't have the patience to hammer on it when it starts to
       | misbehave.
       | 
       | Props to Colin having the guts to take the risk.
        
       | scudsworth wrote:
       | >Over the years, the server has grown to have around a few
       | thousand active accounts, which isn't all that many. However,
       | they've generated something like 32 million statuses. Just to put
       | that in perspective, mastodon.social has over 2 million users,
       | who have generated around 110 million statuses.
       | 
       | unsurprising that the bots would outpace organic users, but wow,
       | what a ratio. i'd be curious to see this data charted over time
        
       | r3trohack3r wrote:
       | Federated networks like Mastadon strike me as being
       | centralization at scale.
       | 
       | They don't appear to solve any of the power dynamics of users and
       | operators - users are still at the mercy of the operator - and
       | they run on either altruism or monetization.
       | 
       | Mastadon appears to have successfully created N copies of the
       | Facebook problem, which is definitely better than where we were.
        
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       (page generated 2024-10-29 23:00 UTC)