Update: so, the responses this far are almost universally that these bots have been blocked by users of the community. There is also a general disinterest in defederating, which is on brand.

You guys wanna do a poll or something or?

I’d like to lead my thoughts with a quote from the admins regarding bots within lemm.ee:

“Bots must not be responsible for the majority of content in any community”

There are two entire instances that immediately spring to mind, zerobytes.monster’s b0t user, and lemmit.online. Their content is quite literally 90% bot content with 0 engagement, and they spam constantly.

Now here at lemm.ee we generally don’t defend from stuff, that’s actually why I prefer this instance. Yes, you can block the bot users and that solves the problem, but hear me out:

These bots ruin the experience on Lemmy for new users. They spam so many posts, attempting to block them from a mobile app will usually crash the app. If you’re a new user coming to Lemm.ee sorting by all, you see tons and tons of empty posts.

Zerobytes is particularly egregious because it doesn’t even repost actual content, just thousands and thousands of links to Reddit posts. It’s a spam instance, period, and I feel strongly about this.

Lemmit.online isn’t quite as bad, but it’s an entire instance dedicated to spam reposting everything from Reddit. All the posts have zero engagement, and the comment value is gone so everything decent gets buried.

Yes there are ways around this on an individual user level, but then you’re creating a context where there’s even less engagement in the vast majority of “new” posts.

Anyway, thems my thoughts. Repost bots are stupid, one that drive traffic to Reddit are even worse. Thoughts?

  • @graphito@beehaw.orgEnglish
    6•1 year ago

    User of those bots here:

    I think this whole problem stems from the lack of tools to configure bot experience. On mastodon, for example, bots can post “unlisted” posts – which don’t show up in the main feed. Only subscribed people receive their posts. On Lemmy there’s no such privacy toggle and admins are forced to shoot a fly with cruise missiles – by defederating instances

    I’d understand if you folks decide to defederate from bot instances however I’d urge you to escalate this discussion upstream to LemmyNet github for following features

    • post privacy i.e. intended reach
    • moderation tools to handle bots activity en masse

    This would be far more lasting impact on quality of global fediverse feed and efficient use of admins’ time IMO

    • @TexMexBazooka@lemm.eeOP
      1•1 year ago

      Thus far you’re the only person in the thread I’ve seen that uses the bots. How do you implement them and how do they improve your Lemmy experience?

      • @graphito@beehaw.orgEnglish
        4•1 year ago

        Firstly, I totally understand people who find reposts annoying and I have blocked few of those because they’re simply irrelevant to me

        lemmit online / hackernews reposts

        • those help drive inspiration for post making: I can snatch best ideas and post my own version on lemmy
          It’s especially helpful when you’re maintaining inactive community where you’re the only poster – since inactive subs are seen as dead ones.
        • not my use case, but I see those instances as ability to combat FOMO for the users who just switched over to lemmy and getting use to its quirks. No need to snoop to reddit if its content is in your feed either way
          • mastodon got almost a dozen of such repost instances from twitter and it’s enormous bonus in transition from birdsite
        • if you see lemmit online posts then someone on your instance wants this content/subscribed to it – it doesn’t appear out of nowhere
        controversial opinion

        tbh I wish each lemmy sub would have its own bot to post content stolen from other places of internet. Almost all popular websites have ones and they do bring large audiences. Be it just memes, science news or animal photos: people stick with a website because they can regularly get their dopamine hit. “Normal people” i.e. lurkers usually don’t care about post originality. People simply want enough good quality content

        QoL bots

        • tldr bots are generally helpful for long reads\vids and I wish they would be available as option on post creation page
        • bots for linking to invidious instances / archive.ph nonpaywalled articles: just saves time

        P.S. as a bonus here’s a page about bots that wikipedia uses to streamline and automate work Wikipedia bots - Wikipedia