RIP botsin.space
Botsin.space will stop new account signups immediately and become read-only after December 15, 2024, due to rising operational costs. Users will receive assistance in account migration before shutdown.
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The operator of botsin.space has announced the decision to shut down the platform, effective immediately for new account signups. The site will transition to read-only mode after December 15, 2024, and will remain accessible in this mode until at least March 2025, with potential extensions. Launched in April 2017, botsin.space was created to facilitate bot creation on the fediverse, attracting users interested in coding and social media. Despite its unique challenges and a modest user base of a few thousand accounts generating 32 million statuses, the server has faced increasing operational costs and performance issues, particularly following a recent Mastodon upgrade. The operator has expressed gratitude for the community's support through donations but has concluded that the financial burden is unsustainable. Instead of seeking more donations to maintain the server, the operator encourages users to support other community-oriented instances. The operator will assist users in migrating their accounts and generating archives before the final shutdown.
- botsin.space will cease new account signups immediately and enter read-only mode after December 15, 2024.
- The platform has been operational since April 2017, focusing on bot creation within the fediverse.
- Increasing operational costs and performance issues have led to the decision to shut down the server.
- The operator encourages users to support other community-driven instances instead of seeking additional donations.
- Users will be assisted in migrating their accounts and generating archives before the final shutdown.
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- Many users express gratitude for the service and share their experiences, highlighting its usefulness for bot projects.
- Concerns are raised about the sustainability of decentralized platforms like Mastodon, with some questioning their ability to scale effectively.
- Suggestions for alternative solutions, such as moving to different hosting services or implementing payment models, are discussed.
- Users reflect on the challenges of running federated networks and the implications of service shutdowns on user experience.
- There is a general sentiment of nostalgia and disappointment over the loss of a platform that provided joy and utility.
28 commentsI'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.
€42.48 max. per month.
CPU: Intel Core i7-7700
RAM: 64 GB
Drives: 2 x 4.0 TB Enterprise HDD
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.
unsurprising that the bots would outpace organic users, but wow, what a ratio. i'd be curious to see this data charted over time
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).
I definitely got joy out of setting up a bot on it. Huge thanks to colin for making it so easy.
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.
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?
Thanks for hosting this all those years. I'll try to find a new home for my bot.
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.
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.
> 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?
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