We read a lot more than we talk, or at least I hope that we do so. Do you think that the content is only valuable if you can interact with it?
Should we just forget about books because it doesn’t have a comment section?
I don’t f*cking care about the size of the Fediverse above a certain threshold, and we have reached that imo.
That can only possibly be true if your niches are so extreme that you and your peers are ostracized by the mainstream channels or if you have no niche interest whatsoever.
Anything in between is completely non-existent in the Fediverse. Take a look at any subreddit after the top 250, and you’ll be hard pressed to find a corresponding Lemmy community, and even if you do manage to find them I’ll give you 100:1 odds they are dead or in a zombie state.
The maker community is non-existent here.
The technology communities have nothing but the usual stream of anti-corporate news that gets a lot of clicks but does not bring any actionable to people.
Same thing for urban planners or those interested in sustainable development. If all you care about is getting shitty memes and having a circlejerk of people saying “look at that asshole because of his big car” then sure !fuckcars will be enough for you. If you want to have a community of people to get organized to see how they can improve their cities and making more human-scale development, you are SOL.
There was an instance for researchers in ML/AL that (I believe) was run by some serious people. The instance seems to be abandoned and the admins is back at posting at Reddit.
they understand and care about the platform’s goals and ethos, not just because it has the biggest potential audience.
This is the same type of gatekeeping that makes sites like lobste.rs completely irrelevant. It may have a higher SNR in relation to something like hackernews, but at the end of the day what matters is the total amount of signal if the noise can be filtered properly.
Answering a post and later realizing it was made by a bot makes you feel tricked and deceived.
Yes, that is indeed a problem and unfortunately I haven’t been able to implement the solution as fast I’d like. But if you know that the post is from a bot who potentially will become a real user (by migrating through the fediverser portal) and that one of the reasons to make it more compelling to them is by having content here that is not available elsewhere, why not write anyway? At the very least, your comment might be helpful to the other “real” users accessing the community. Also, the more real people start participating, the less the feeling of “ghost town” there is.
On the big plan behind it, who the hell would want to or should take over a Lemmy account from an instance that’s widely known to be populated by bots, maybe even blocked or defederated for that reason?
It helps if you stop thinking about them as “bots” in the same sense that we talk about “Twitter bots”. Twitter bots are created by someone with the intent of misinforming or giving the impression that some opinion is shared by a larger group of people. The alien.top “bots” are nothing like that. The content created by them is actually coming from a Reddit user and I am being very diligent about not mirroring anything on the popular subs. A lot of the spam is already filtered by Reddit itself and I honestly am getting less spam reports from alien.top accounts that I got from, e.g, lemmy.blahaj.zone.
The fediverse is so small, but so small, that alien.top has reached top 5 in status count in less than two months. So far, I know of only lemmy.world that decided to defederate with it. If alien.top ever becomes minimally popular, it will be the people on LW that will be in the minority and they will be the ones missing out on content, not the other way around.
I’ve already disabled the bots, but if alien.top gets burned because of some stigma associated with them, I can create another fediverser instance that does only automated subscription to the proper communities, or I can add it to communick.news or any of the other 15 topic-based instances that I am running. I hope that it doesn’t get to that point, but if I have to sacrifice alien.top in order to keep the idea of fediverser and the topic-based instances intact, I will.