RIP botsin.space

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&#x27;t much use.<p>I&#x27;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&#x2F;websites like it was the 90s&#x2F;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&#x27;s just it, they&#x27;re silos. Might as well be back on seperate forums for our seperate interests again. When you want the power of a <i>mix</i> of accounts&#x2F;networks&#x2F;interests everything balloons and can&#x27;t be run with funds and larger centralization. Sigh. It&#x27;s a tough one and has yet to be solved in full, with any existing approaches all sort of half-solutions. Maybe that&#x27;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.

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.:<p><pre><code> €42.48 max. per month. CPU: Intel Core i7-7700 RAM: 64 GB Drives: 2 x 4.0 TB Enterprise HDD </code></pre> Thats with unlimited traffic, but no ddos protection or similar, so I don&#x27;t know how essential that was at DO. Also you&#x27;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&#x27;s SN, and the server will be up again within 20 minutes. Absolutely acceptable for a side-project that doesn&#x27;t offer anything mission critical. But I&#x27;d really be curious what the bill currently is at DO, and maybe you have some monster HW there that can&#x27;t be matched here. Genuinely curious.

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&#x27;s implementation being a poor match to high volume bots. You could imagine other architectures that were more efficient for this use case, it&#x27;d be a fun yak shaving exercise.<p>If anyone needs to migrate their own projects I&#x27;ve had good luck with feed2toot, to post RSS to a Mastodon account on a ordinary server. It&#x27;s been around a long time now and seems reliable.

&gt;Over the years, the server has grown to have around a few thousand active accounts, which isn&#x27;t all that many. However, they&#x27;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.<p>unsurprising that the bots would outpace organic users, but wow, what a ratio. i&#x27;d be curious to see this data charted over time

<i>&quot;I live in fear of an AI scraper figuring out how to scrape all of these files and bankrupting me overnight.&quot;</i><p>What is the best way around this for a hobby project similar to botsin.space. I don&#x27;t mind the service going down in case of a DOS attack. I want to handle TLS myself though (so no free Cloudflare).<p>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&#x27;s how it is, I&#x27;m not asking for a dream house, just reliable cost control).

This is incredibly sad; botsin.space has been a steady stream of joy for me over the years. Here&#x27;s hoping a bunch of alternatives pop up.

&gt;I&#x27;d like to thank everyone who has ever run a bot on botsin.space and gotten joy out of it<p>I definitely got joy out of setting up a bot on it. Huge thanks to colin for making it so easy.

It&#x27;s always nice when Fediverse servers have a sunsetting period which allows account migration to other servers.

I&#x27;ve had lots of fun calling it bot sin space. It will be missed.

Safe travels to a known name.<p>One of the reasons I maintain a node with only one user is I fear the day I&#x27;ll be responsible for other people&#x27;s social media presence; I could easily see myself going &quot;It&#x27;s just a few thousand users&quot; and the next thing I know I&#x27;m asking whether I can keep this thing going (and agonizing over what it&#x27;ll do to my users to cut the service). And unlike Colin, I despise Rails and wouldn&#x27;t have the patience to hammer on it when it starts to misbehave.<p>Props to Colin having the guts to take the risk.

Ah bummer I&#x27;ve been posting my earthin24 timelapses[1] to this for quite a while now.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;botsin.space&#x2F;@earthin24" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;botsin.space&#x2F;@earthin24</a>

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

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

Website is being hugged:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;6Krrp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;6Krrp</a>

An interview with the creator from 2018: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;botwiki.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;catching-up-with-the-creator-of-botsin-space&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;botwiki.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;catching-up-with-the-creator-of-bot...</a>

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

Why are these Twitter clones always so resource intensive and finicky? Twitter is just &quot;IRC in reverse&quot;, if you take literal descriptions transitive relations in IRC(v2) and moved around nouns, lots of it should apply to Twitter&#x2F;Bluesky&#x2F;Mastodon well. RDB gurus can probably recreate lots of APIs as tables on bare MySQL too.<p>It doesn&#x27;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.<p>Are we doomed to keep adding more RAM and more disk and more bandwidth to catch up with ever-growing bloat?

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.

If it&#x27;s not generating income consider moving it to your basement. Maybe it&#x27;ll be down occasionally, but not forever.

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

RIP!<p>Thanks for hosting this all those years. I&#x27;ll try to find a new home for my bot.

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

Maybe requiring payment could&#x27;ve worked out instead of shutting down?

Federated networks like Mastodon and Lemmy are going to get people well-acquainted with websites shutting down. It&#x27;s hard work (time, money, etc.) to run these things for people, and people start to really lean on them.<p>It&#x27;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.<p>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.

Federated networks like Mastadon strike me as being centralization at scale.<p>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.<p>Mastadon appears to have successfully created N copies of the Facebook problem, which is definitely better than where we were.

The important bit<p>&gt; 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.<p>I found the latest upgrade also making some odd UX decisions. Content warnings got a weird new styling and it&#x27;s not clear anymore how to hide images separately from hiding the text.<p>Are the mastodons okay?<p>There are good things too, don&#x27;t get me wrong, like grouping notifications instead of getting a notification flood on a popular toot. That&#x27;s nice. But what&#x27;s up with perf regressions and (in my opinion) UX regressions?