11 ms·

RIP botsin.space

204 points by edent 2y ago

Kye 2y ago
I've had lots of fun calling it bot sin space. It will be missed.
sigmar 2y ago
>I'd like to thank everyone who has ever run a bot on botsin.space and gotten joy out of it I definitely got joy out of setting up a bot on it. Huge thanks to colin for making it so easy.
tjwds 2y ago
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 2y ago
  What was it?
  - acherion 2y ago
    A mastodon instance where bots were welcomed.
darknavi 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
  - joeross 2y ago
    +1 for omg.lol, it’s a great community.
- OgsyedIE 2y ago
  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.
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    Citation highly needed. I'm close to quite a few people who run larger instances than that, including my own, and none of them have ever told me about getting subpoenaed. That's exactly the kind of war story we'd tell each other, too. I've seen no evidence that running a fediverse server is nearly so legally fraught.
    - OgsyedIE 2y ago
      I'll go looking for the citation and it may take a couple hours but I'll point out that FWIW my info is drawn from some academic surveying vBulletin and Xenforo site owners in the 2010s so I wouldn't be surprised if they aren't applicable anymore.
pietervdvn 2y ago
RIP! Thanks for hosting this all those years. I'll try to find a new home for my bot.
shadowgovt 2y ago
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 2y ago
>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
- Yawrehto 2y ago
  It makes sense. Assuming the average bot toots ~once an hour (24 times a day) and has been tooting for two years, you get on the order (nearest multiple of 5000) of 20,000 toots per user, which works out to 1600 users. Also, there's a measuring change from active accounts to plain old users. I don't know the proportion that are active, but if I recall right, the fediverse as a whole had under 1 million active users. Assuming 500,000 active accounts that pull all the weight, it's 220 toots per user on average.
r3trohack3r 2y ago
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.
- LeoPanthera 2y ago
  > users are still at the mercy of the operator Mastodon allows you to be the operator, if you so choose.
  - ketzo 2y ago
    I think OP’s point is that most users don’t choose to do so. Whether because of lack of ability, interest, time, whatever, people would mostly rather just be users.
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    > Mastodon allows you to be the operator, if you so choose. ... and if you forget a critical update or you see it too late, you'll get hacked. Self-hosting anything comes with serious challenges that most people only realize in hindsight.
- MBCook 2y ago
  I like Mastodon, it’s the only Twitter like thing I use. But I think this just reflects the facts. Centralization works and is highly preferable for many users. Just like in the only big federated service: email. Yes you can run your own. But there are a lot of costs in terms of time/complexity/knowledge/trust to that. Outsourcing it to someone else is really nice. You don’t need one big instance like Twitter was. Having a small handful of big ones works well too. But the dream some people seemed to have where everyone should run their own instance alone or with a few friends was never going to happen.
  - pessimizer 2y ago
NelsonMinar 2y ago
Aw too bad, this has been a really useful service. I wonder if anyone wants to pick it up? The post mentions part of the problem is Mastodon's implementation being a poor match to high volume bots. You could imagine other architectures that were more efficient for this use case, it'd be a fun yak shaving exercise. If anyone needs to migrate their own projects I've had good luck with feed2toot, to post RSS to a Mastodon account on a ordinary server. It's been around a long time now and seems reliable.
op00to 2y ago
Thanks, botsin.space! It was fun while it lasted!
dawnerd 2y ago
Damn, I asked the other day if it was down after noticing a ton of timeouts in sidekiq. Reached out and Colin said they were looking into it. Guess fixing it up just proved to be too much.
Evidlo 2y ago
Maybe requiring payment could've worked out instead of shutting down?
- paranoidrobot 2y ago
  No relationship to the author, but this makes it into running a commercial service. So, at a rough guess you need: - Some kind of company entity for all this to belong to, possibly a LLC, and all the associated paperwork that goes with it. - Bank accounts and some way to handle card payments - Some level of requirement to provide customer service/support, at least for billing related issues - Have to now also deal with card fraud, refunds, disputes, charge-backs - even if you use some service that will handle most of it, you'd still need some level of involvement - Have to handle billing related tech stuff - issuing bills, ensuring accounts are activated/deactivated based on billing events - And now you need to charge enough to cover all of the above, and your time, and the time of any professionals involved in the above Starts to sound like at least a part time job. The OP may not want to go there. For my personal projects that I provide as a service to others, I do them for the fun of it. In the past I've bailed or cut access to them when they've started to feel like a job.
  - slightwinder 2y ago
    Isn't there a nonprofit association aimed for making the managing/finance-side of such small projects easy? I mean, there are all kinds of orgs for free software and other hobbies. Having a dedicated organization for collecting small money or donation and handling taxes worldwide for small projects, might be something useful, I guess.
threemux 2y ago
Website is being hugged: https://archive.ph/6Krrp https://archive.ph/6Krrp
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
I wholly appreciated the openness to accepting bot accounts, migrated some projects from twitter there during the big exoduses in the last couple years. And while it worked for bot purposes, fun to tinker with etc...(not unlike twitter tbf) it was just some server in space a blip in the fediverse and traction and lack of proper network effects for accounts meant it wasn't much use. I'm not hot on the fediverse in general, and this just sours me on it a bit more. A bunch of dedicated admins keeping instances going, basically running hobby servers/websites like it was the 90s/early 00s, is never gonna work for the kind fo scale services grow to these days. I know not everything requires scale and lots of ppl are happy existing in their little silos, but that's just it, they're silos. Might as well be back on seperate forums for our seperate interests again. When you want the power of a mix of accounts/networks/interests everything balloons and can't be run with funds and larger centralization. Sigh. It's a tough one and has yet to be solved in full, with any existing approaches all sort of half-solutions. Maybe that's the way forwards in general (an internet of islands) but it sucks to have things going up and down and having to migrate around the net (with or without our own data) like nomads.
- AlexandrB 2y ago
  > When you want the power of a mix of accounts/networks/interests everything balloons and can't be run with funds and larger centralization. I don't really get the appeal of this. Different topics/interests often demand different moderation and forum features. Trying to shove everything into the lowest common denominator of social media results in things like people posting essays as screenshots of Apple Notes. The only obvious benefit I see of this kind of large scale centralization is for marketing. And that's not a benefit to me as a user.
  - CaptainFever 2y ago
    The benefit of a centralized forum like Reddit, for a user like me, is the ability to use one account for everything (i.e. easy to join new forums) and the ability to have everything on one algorithmic or chronological feed. Traditional forums can solve the former by using social sign-ins, and the latter by having RSS. However, support for either of this is inconsistent, so it's usually easier to just use subreddits. Finally, money. Forums cost money to host, while subreddits don't.
gradientsrneat 2y ago
It's always nice when Fediverse servers have a sunsetting period which allows account migration to other servers.
jordigh 2y ago
The important bit > But the recent Mastodon upgrade has caused a significant amount of performance degradation, and I think the only way to really solve it is going to be to throw a lot of money into hardware. I found the latest upgrade also making some odd UX decisions. Content warnings got a weird new styling and it's not clear anymore how to hide images separately from hiding the text. Are the mastodons okay? There are good things too, don't get me wrong, like grouping notifications instead of getting a notification flood on a popular toot. That's nice. But what's up with perf regressions and (in my opinion) UX regressions?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- renchap 2y ago
  The content warning styling may be reverted (its already done in `main`), and we are not aware of any performance issues with 4.3, it's in fact the opposite from all the feedback we got. I am really curious of what is happening here and asked the admin to provide more information.
numpad0 2y ago
Why are these Twitter clones always so resource intensive and finicky? Twitter is just "IRC in reverse", if you take literal descriptions transitive relations in IRC(v2) and moved around nouns, lots of it should apply to Twitter/Bluesky/Mastodon well. RDB gurus can probably recreate lots of APIs as tables on bare MySQL too. It doesn't make sense to me that such a thing take so much dev and ops cost compared to IRCv2 servers, other than for the fact that modern webdev just so happens to be extremely bloated, especially when extremely competent and high spirited developers are giving up like this. Are we doomed to keep adding more RAM and more disk and more bandwidth to catch up with ever-growing bloat?
- robobro 2y ago
  From what I understand, IRC doesn't hold messages for extended periods of time or allow media uploads, while fediverse does, so that's one big difference.
  - numpad0 2y ago
    Do they have to? Twitter does and that's noble, but can't the server, say, per-user logrotate, sign that with webserver cert, and send via email or force download or push to HTML localStorage thing when user is on desktop and then forget about it?
- strken 2y ago
  I think there are issues with hotspots. The most popular tweets are seen by a big chunk of the userbase, which means they have to operate on a fanout model where each tweet is pushed to individual followers. I believe IRC doesn't operate like that. The messages delivered to each user don't need to be retained, and I assume the size of the largest channels is in the tens or hundreds of thousands.
- mardifoufs 2y ago
  Because twitter isn't just IRC in reverse?
- koito17 2y ago
  Not related to Mastodon, but in the case of Matrix, the server software ranges from "runs on a raspberry pi with zero issues" (Conduit) to "even with 16 GB of RAM, federating with a large enough room will exhaust Python's heap" (Synapse). In the case of Conduit, a Matrix server with a few private rooms and users consumed only 32 MB of RAM, using RocksDB for storage. The equivalent on Synapse required about 5x as much memory, despite using SQLite. In practice, Synapse instances will use Postgres since many appservice plugins specifically require Postgres and don't support SQLite. Not to mention, SQLite isn't optimized for frequent, concurrent writes. I do sincerely think the choice of Rails, and the fact Ruby only got a compiler people use recently, means that most Ruby programs require fairly beefy processors and plenty of memory in order to keep up with a few hundred clients. Of course, I am extrapolating based off my experience running Synapse (a Matrix server) with Postgres. There is a chance Mastodon scales much better.
mmastrac 2y ago
Ack. I have a bot there. I appreciate the extended warning time.
niggaman62420 2y ago
[flagged]
iforgotpassword 2y ago
If this is just a matter of motivation or lack of time I can understand, but if cost is an issue, why not just move to hetzner? A dedicated server there can be had for around 40 bucks, e.g.: €42.48 max. per month. CPU: Intel Core i7-7700 RAM: 64 GB Drives: 2 x 4.0 TB Enterprise HDD Thats with unlimited traffic, but no ddos protection or similar, so I don't know how essential that was at DO. Also you're on physical hw which is always more annoying if you have to call in because of a failing disk, but from my years of experience this is as smooth as it gets; shut down the server, open a ticket requesting replacement ASAP and give the drive's SN, and the server will be up again within 20 minutes. Absolutely acceptable for a side-project that doesn't offer anything mission critical. But I'd really be curious what the bill currently is at DO, and maybe you have some monster HW there that can't be matched here. Genuinely curious.
- lifthrasiir 2y ago
  I think the author assumes the server requirement to continue to increase in the future, even only because of ever growing number of statuses, so no amount of server hardware right now is going to put one at ease anyway.
  - iforgotpassword 2y ago
    Sure, with 191GB we'd need to know what the growth looks like. But 4TB might work for a good while. Unfortunately we know nothing about the rest. Was it a mid-tier VPS and all the money went into storage and traffic? Then this should be plenty for another couple years at least.
    - immibis 2y ago
      You're also allowed to choose to expire old tweets. Fediverse doesn't force every administrator to archive junk forever.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
    It may also be that the moderation effort required will also continue to increase in the future, that the human ability to that is exhaustible. i.e. It may actually decrease at a point in time. You might want to act on these opposing trends before they reach a crisis point.
neonsunset 2y ago
I assume just not using Ruby would have given the project a few more years of scalability hassle-free runway.
- mosselman 2y ago
  But then only 1/10 of the features they currently have would’ve been finished. The real culprit is the cloud premium. If you go with hetzner you have lots of runway too.
  - wink 2y ago
    This would work for an instance of human accounts who need real UX. A bot instance should really work with the most basic Fediverse software, if it supports posting, reading, replying, etc.
  - neonsunset 2y ago
    This is a typical excuse I always hear in defense of Ruby but am yet to see a proof that it is the case, with plenty of arguments that demonstrate that Ruby also happens to be a productivity loss the moment the project scale goes beyond trivial. It has such an embarrassing failure mode that is unthinkable in statically typed compiled languages. Rails is not even a better choice at its main selling point which is developer UX, it has been many years since the rest of the industry caught up and surpassed this. Nowadays, as a primarily C# developer I’m always baffled by the crutches RoR developers have to deal with - one would just not tolerate these in .NET. At the end of the day, if every line of code costs 100x more, it’s very difficult to come up with a good reason where such Ruby tax is worth it in the projects that cannot afford to throw more compute and memory at a problem.
    - hombre_fatal 2y ago
      The proof is that Mastodon and his server were implemented in Ruby. It doesn't exist in another language. And it's the same language that he uses at his day job and according to him, it's part of what compelled him to work on it at all. The fact that he built it and maintained it is the proof for the claim. Without Ruby it simply doesn't exist, so it doesn't matter how much hypothetically better your favorite language is.
klntsky 2y ago
Only a very rich person would use managed cloud for anything large scale.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ahrjay 2y ago
Ah bummer I've been posting my earthin24 timelapses[1] to this for quite a while now. [1] https://botsin.space/@earthin24 https://botsin.space/@earthin24
pluc 2y ago
For a decentralized system, there sure is a lot of stress on that one database.
- ciroduran 2y ago
  Not decentralized: federated. Some instances are a lot bigger than others, and some work in different ways, such as one instance with lots of bots making procedural content.
weinzierl 2y ago
"I live in fear of an AI scraper figuring out how to scrape all of these files and bankrupting me overnight." What is the best way around this for a hobby project similar to botsin.space. I don't mind the service going down in case of a DOS attack. I want to handle TLS myself though (so no free Cloudflare). Most important thing is my good sleep at night, so no fine print that allows the provider to pass on the cost to me in case something goes wrong. (If that means higher fixed cost, that's how it is, I'm not asking for a dream house, just reliable cost control).
- _fat_santa 2y ago
  I could see a huge business opportunity here. In Amazon S3 there is a concept of "requestor pays" so you can have an S3 bucket that loads of people download data from yet you aren't hit with the bill and instead the "requestor" pays for the bandwidth. With AI scraping becoming more of a thing, a cloud platform could roll out a feature where an AI is allowed to scrape the daylights out of your site, but they must pay for the bandwidth or bandwidth + premium. In this scenario you wouldn't wake up bankrupt but instead with a windfall of cash because TikTok decided to scrape all your stuff.
- kraftman 2y ago
  A dedicated server with no bandwidth cap?
uuddlrlrbaba 2y ago
If it's not generating income consider moving it to your basement. Maybe it'll be down occasionally, but not forever.
Kye 2y ago
An interview with the creator from 2018: https://botwiki.org/blog/catching-up-with-the-creator-of-botsin-space/ https://botwiki.org/blog/catching-up-with-the-creator-of-bot...

204 points by edent 2y ago

Kye 2y ago

I've had lots of fun calling it bot sin space. It will be missed.

>I'd like to thank everyone who has ever run a bot on botsin.space and gotten joy out of it I definitely got joy out of setting up a bot on it. Huge thanks to colin for making it so easy.

tjwds 2y ago

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 2y ago
What was it?
- acherion 2y ago
  A mastodon instance where bots were welcomed.

darknavi 2y ago

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 2y ago
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.
- joeross 2y ago
  +1 for omg.lol, it’s a great community.
OgsyedIE 2y ago
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.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  Citation highly needed. I'm close to quite a few people who run larger instances than that, including my own, and none of them have ever told me about getting subpoenaed. That's exactly the kind of war story we'd tell each other, too. I've seen no evidence that running a fediverse server is nearly so legally fraught.
  - OgsyedIE 2y ago
    I'll go looking for the citation and it may take a couple hours but I'll point out that FWIW my info is drawn from some academic surveying vBulletin and Xenforo site owners in the 2010s so I wouldn't be surprised if they aren't applicable anymore.

pietervdvn 2y ago

RIP! Thanks for hosting this all those years. I'll try to find a new home for my bot.

shadowgovt 2y ago

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 2y ago

>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

Yawrehto 2y ago
It makes sense. Assuming the average bot toots ~once an hour (24 times a day) and has been tooting for two years, you get on the order (nearest multiple of 5000) of 20,000 toots per user, which works out to 1600 users. Also, there's a measuring change from active accounts to plain old users. I don't know the proportion that are active, but if I recall right, the fediverse as a whole had under 1 million active users. Assuming 500,000 active accounts that pull all the weight, it's 220 toots per user on average.

r3trohack3r 2y ago

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.

LeoPanthera 2y ago
> users are still at the mercy of the operator Mastodon allows you to be the operator, if you so choose.
- ketzo 2y ago
  I think OP’s point is that most users don’t choose to do so. Whether because of lack of ability, interest, time, whatever, people would mostly rather just be users.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > Mastodon allows you to be the operator, if you so choose. ... and if you forget a critical update or you see it too late, you'll get hacked. Self-hosting anything comes with serious challenges that most people only realize in hindsight.
MBCook 2y ago
I like Mastodon, it’s the only Twitter like thing I use. But I think this just reflects the facts. Centralization works and is highly preferable for many users. Just like in the only big federated service: email. Yes you can run your own. But there are a lot of costs in terms of time/complexity/knowledge/trust to that. Outsourcing it to someone else is really nice. You don’t need one big instance like Twitter was. Having a small handful of big ones works well too. But the dream some people seemed to have where everyone should run their own instance alone or with a few friends was never going to happen.
- pessimizer 2y ago

NelsonMinar 2y ago

Aw too bad, this has been a really useful service. I wonder if anyone wants to pick it up? The post mentions part of the problem is Mastodon's implementation being a poor match to high volume bots. You could imagine other architectures that were more efficient for this use case, it'd be a fun yak shaving exercise. If anyone needs to migrate their own projects I've had good luck with feed2toot, to post RSS to a Mastodon account on a ordinary server. It's been around a long time now and seems reliable.

op00to 2y ago

Thanks, botsin.space! It was fun while it lasted!

dawnerd 2y ago

Damn, I asked the other day if it was down after noticing a ton of timeouts in sidekiq. Reached out and Colin said they were looking into it. Guess fixing it up just proved to be too much.

Evidlo 2y ago

Maybe requiring payment could've worked out instead of shutting down?

paranoidrobot 2y ago
No relationship to the author, but this makes it into running a commercial service. So, at a rough guess you need: - Some kind of company entity for all this to belong to, possibly a LLC, and all the associated paperwork that goes with it. - Bank accounts and some way to handle card payments - Some level of requirement to provide customer service/support, at least for billing related issues - Have to now also deal with card fraud, refunds, disputes, charge-backs - even if you use some service that will handle most of it, you'd still need some level of involvement - Have to handle billing related tech stuff - issuing bills, ensuring accounts are activated/deactivated based on billing events - And now you need to charge enough to cover all of the above, and your time, and the time of any professionals involved in the above Starts to sound like at least a part time job. The OP may not want to go there. For my personal projects that I provide as a service to others, I do them for the fun of it. In the past I've bailed or cut access to them when they've started to feel like a job.
- slightwinder 2y ago
  Isn't there a nonprofit association aimed for making the managing/finance-side of such small projects easy? I mean, there are all kinds of orgs for free software and other hobbies. Having a dedicated organization for collecting small money or donation and handling taxes worldwide for small projects, might be something useful, I guess.

threemux 2y ago

Website is being hugged: https://archive.ph/6Krrp https://archive.ph/6Krrp

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

I wholly appreciated the openness to accepting bot accounts, migrated some projects from twitter there during the big exoduses in the last couple years. And while it worked for bot purposes, fun to tinker with etc...(not unlike twitter tbf) it was just some server in space a blip in the fediverse and traction and lack of proper network effects for accounts meant it wasn't much use. I'm not hot on the fediverse in general, and this just sours me on it a bit more. A bunch of dedicated admins keeping instances going, basically running hobby servers/websites like it was the 90s/early 00s, is never gonna work for the kind fo scale services grow to these days. I know not everything requires scale and lots of ppl are happy existing in their little silos, but that's just it, they're silos. Might as well be back on seperate forums for our seperate interests again. When you want the power of a mix of accounts/networks/interests everything balloons and can't be run with funds and larger centralization. Sigh. It's a tough one and has yet to be solved in full, with any existing approaches all sort of half-solutions. Maybe that's the way forwards in general (an internet of islands) but it sucks to have things going up and down and having to migrate around the net (with or without our own data) like nomads.

AlexandrB 2y ago
> When you want the power of a mix of accounts/networks/interests everything balloons and can't be run with funds and larger centralization. I don't really get the appeal of this. Different topics/interests often demand different moderation and forum features. Trying to shove everything into the lowest common denominator of social media results in things like people posting essays as screenshots of Apple Notes. The only obvious benefit I see of this kind of large scale centralization is for marketing. And that's not a benefit to me as a user.
- CaptainFever 2y ago
  The benefit of a centralized forum like Reddit, for a user like me, is the ability to use one account for everything (i.e. easy to join new forums) and the ability to have everything on one algorithmic or chronological feed. Traditional forums can solve the former by using social sign-ins, and the latter by having RSS. However, support for either of this is inconsistent, so it's usually easier to just use subreddits. Finally, money. Forums cost money to host, while subreddits don't.

gradientsrneat 2y ago

It's always nice when Fediverse servers have a sunsetting period which allows account migration to other servers.

jordigh 2y ago

The important bit > But the recent Mastodon upgrade has caused a significant amount of performance degradation, and I think the only way to really solve it is going to be to throw a lot of money into hardware. I found the latest upgrade also making some odd UX decisions. Content warnings got a weird new styling and it's not clear anymore how to hide images separately from hiding the text. Are the mastodons okay? There are good things too, don't get me wrong, like grouping notifications instead of getting a notification flood on a popular toot. That's nice. But what's up with perf regressions and (in my opinion) UX regressions?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
renchap 2y ago
The content warning styling may be reverted (its already done in `main`), and we are not aware of any performance issues with 4.3, it's in fact the opposite from all the feedback we got. I am really curious of what is happening here and asked the admin to provide more information.

numpad0 2y ago

Why are these Twitter clones always so resource intensive and finicky? Twitter is just "IRC in reverse", if you take literal descriptions transitive relations in IRC(v2) and moved around nouns, lots of it should apply to Twitter/Bluesky/Mastodon well. RDB gurus can probably recreate lots of APIs as tables on bare MySQL too. It doesn't make sense to me that such a thing take so much dev and ops cost compared to IRCv2 servers, other than for the fact that modern webdev just so happens to be extremely bloated, especially when extremely competent and high spirited developers are giving up like this. Are we doomed to keep adding more RAM and more disk and more bandwidth to catch up with ever-growing bloat?

robobro 2y ago
From what I understand, IRC doesn't hold messages for extended periods of time or allow media uploads, while fediverse does, so that's one big difference.
- numpad0 2y ago
  Do they have to? Twitter does and that's noble, but can't the server, say, per-user logrotate, sign that with webserver cert, and send via email or force download or push to HTML localStorage thing when user is on desktop and then forget about it?
strken 2y ago
I think there are issues with hotspots. The most popular tweets are seen by a big chunk of the userbase, which means they have to operate on a fanout model where each tweet is pushed to individual followers. I believe IRC doesn't operate like that. The messages delivered to each user don't need to be retained, and I assume the size of the largest channels is in the tens or hundreds of thousands.
mardifoufs 2y ago
Because twitter isn't just IRC in reverse?
koito17 2y ago
Not related to Mastodon, but in the case of Matrix, the server software ranges from "runs on a raspberry pi with zero issues" (Conduit) to "even with 16 GB of RAM, federating with a large enough room will exhaust Python's heap" (Synapse). In the case of Conduit, a Matrix server with a few private rooms and users consumed only 32 MB of RAM, using RocksDB for storage. The equivalent on Synapse required about 5x as much memory, despite using SQLite. In practice, Synapse instances will use Postgres since many appservice plugins specifically require Postgres and don't support SQLite. Not to mention, SQLite isn't optimized for frequent, concurrent writes. I do sincerely think the choice of Rails, and the fact Ruby only got a compiler people use recently, means that most Ruby programs require fairly beefy processors and plenty of memory in order to keep up with a few hundred clients. Of course, I am extrapolating based off my experience running Synapse (a Matrix server) with Postgres. There is a chance Mastodon scales much better.

mmastrac 2y ago

Ack. I have a bot there. I appreciate the extended warning time.

niggaman62420 2y ago

[flagged]

iforgotpassword 2y ago

If this is just a matter of motivation or lack of time I can understand, but if cost is an issue, why not just move to hetzner? A dedicated server there can be had for around 40 bucks, e.g.: €42.48 max. per month. CPU: Intel Core i7-7700 RAM: 64 GB Drives: 2 x 4.0 TB Enterprise HDD Thats with unlimited traffic, but no ddos protection or similar, so I don't know how essential that was at DO. Also you're on physical hw which is always more annoying if you have to call in because of a failing disk, but from my years of experience this is as smooth as it gets; shut down the server, open a ticket requesting replacement ASAP and give the drive's SN, and the server will be up again within 20 minutes. Absolutely acceptable for a side-project that doesn't offer anything mission critical. But I'd really be curious what the bill currently is at DO, and maybe you have some monster HW there that can't be matched here. Genuinely curious.

lifthrasiir 2y ago
I think the author assumes the server requirement to continue to increase in the future, even only because of ever growing number of statuses, so no amount of server hardware right now is going to put one at ease anyway.
- iforgotpassword 2y ago
  Sure, with 191GB we'd need to know what the growth looks like. But 4TB might work for a good while. Unfortunately we know nothing about the rest. Was it a mid-tier VPS and all the money went into storage and traffic? Then this should be plenty for another couple years at least.
  - immibis 2y ago
    You're also allowed to choose to expire old tweets. Fediverse doesn't force every administrator to archive junk forever.
- SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
  It may also be that the moderation effort required will also continue to increase in the future, that the human ability to that is exhaustible. i.e. It may actually decrease at a point in time. You might want to act on these opposing trends before they reach a crisis point.

neonsunset 2y ago

I assume just not using Ruby would have given the project a few more years of scalability hassle-free runway.

mosselman 2y ago
But then only 1/10 of the features they currently have would’ve been finished. The real culprit is the cloud premium. If you go with hetzner you have lots of runway too.
- wink 2y ago
  This would work for an instance of human accounts who need real UX. A bot instance should really work with the most basic Fediverse software, if it supports posting, reading, replying, etc.
- neonsunset 2y ago
  This is a typical excuse I always hear in defense of Ruby but am yet to see a proof that it is the case, with plenty of arguments that demonstrate that Ruby also happens to be a productivity loss the moment the project scale goes beyond trivial. It has such an embarrassing failure mode that is unthinkable in statically typed compiled languages. Rails is not even a better choice at its main selling point which is developer UX, it has been many years since the rest of the industry caught up and surpassed this. Nowadays, as a primarily C# developer I’m always baffled by the crutches RoR developers have to deal with - one would just not tolerate these in .NET. At the end of the day, if every line of code costs 100x more, it’s very difficult to come up with a good reason where such Ruby tax is worth it in the projects that cannot afford to throw more compute and memory at a problem.
  - hombre_fatal 2y ago
    The proof is that Mastodon and his server were implemented in Ruby. It doesn't exist in another language. And it's the same language that he uses at his day job and according to him, it's part of what compelled him to work on it at all. The fact that he built it and maintained it is the proof for the claim. Without Ruby it simply doesn't exist, so it doesn't matter how much hypothetically better your favorite language is.

klntsky 2y ago

Only a very rich person would use managed cloud for anything large scale.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ahrjay 2y ago

Ah bummer I've been posting my earthin24 timelapses[1] to this for quite a while now. [1] https://botsin.space/@earthin24 https://botsin.space/@earthin24

pluc 2y ago

For a decentralized system, there sure is a lot of stress on that one database.

ciroduran 2y ago
Not decentralized: federated. Some instances are a lot bigger than others, and some work in different ways, such as one instance with lots of bots making procedural content.

weinzierl 2y ago

"I live in fear of an AI scraper figuring out how to scrape all of these files and bankrupting me overnight." What is the best way around this for a hobby project similar to botsin.space. I don't mind the service going down in case of a DOS attack. I want to handle TLS myself though (so no free Cloudflare). Most important thing is my good sleep at night, so no fine print that allows the provider to pass on the cost to me in case something goes wrong. (If that means higher fixed cost, that's how it is, I'm not asking for a dream house, just reliable cost control).

_fat_santa 2y ago
I could see a huge business opportunity here. In Amazon S3 there is a concept of "requestor pays" so you can have an S3 bucket that loads of people download data from yet you aren't hit with the bill and instead the "requestor" pays for the bandwidth. With AI scraping becoming more of a thing, a cloud platform could roll out a feature where an AI is allowed to scrape the daylights out of your site, but they must pay for the bandwidth or bandwidth + premium. In this scenario you wouldn't wake up bankrupt but instead with a windfall of cash because TikTok decided to scrape all your stuff.
kraftman 2y ago
A dedicated server with no bandwidth cap?

uuddlrlrbaba 2y ago

If it's not generating income consider moving it to your basement. Maybe it'll be down occasionally, but not forever.

Kye 2y ago

An interview with the creator from 2018: https://botwiki.org/blog/catching-up-with-the-creator-of-botsin-space/ https://botwiki.org/blog/catching-up-with-the-creator-of-bot...