Am I just noticing them more now? It’s like every other post now is a bot. Please don’t tell me that lemmy is about to be like reddit where it’s only bots that post anything at all
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any public space that intermediates people attention is eventually going to be spam by bots, proportionally to the number of people present. Lemmy doesn’t do much to avoid this. The public internet has no future and the fediverse should be building tools for federated community spaces rather than public spaces shaped in the image of attention-harvesting machines.
Maybe your instance is federating with someone new that does a lot of bot posting? Sometimes all it takes is one person on the instance to join a very active bot community and next thing you know members are seeing a ton of new bot posts.
Editing to add- On Lemmy you can turn off viewing bot accounts completely in your account settings if you don’t ever want to see them.
deleted by creator
If you’re using the Boost app, there is a toggle for it. You can find it by going to your profile and hitting the “Edit” button.
How would Lemmy identify who the bots are
They are meant to be self reporting/labeled by the creator. There is also a setting for that in the account page.
Note that these options will be slightly different to change on the webui but it can be done even if you aren’t a Boost user.
I just have bots disabled on my account. I suggest you try that too
I think they were always there, it’s that organic posts have gone down since the election is over and the ratio had changed.
do you have examples of these bot posts? i don’t think i’ve ever seen one.
On here? I haven’t noticed, but with the lax admission procedures on some instances spammers, scammers and bots are kind of inevitable.
In the really long term you’ll probably need an email address that needs a phone number that needs a physical address like everything else.
It could be instance-dependent. Do you have any example screenshots?
If there’s one or two prolific posters you keep seeing and it’s annoying to you, you can block them. If it’s certain communities you can curate that for yourself too.
You can also “block all bots” (but the bot flag is generally self-reported). If you think that a bot is not reporting itself correctly (and it’s not just a terminally online lemmy user) then you can report them to that instance.
I was just scrolling and saw bot after bot. All with different names. I just when ahead and blocked all bots
Scrolling in what? All? I try to keep my subscriptions curated so I don’t really see a lot of the bot communities, without needing to blanket block bots.
The lemmy_news@lemmy.wtf bot is pretty prolific, but it seems to be a little tamer than its predecessor. It was originally on infosec.pub, but the admin there, Jerry banned it.
I see Zippybot quite a lot as well. And then there is the rss feeder bot, but after blocking all of the communities from that instance I hardly, if ever see it.
