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?

  • amio@kbin.social
    104·
    1 year ago

    Again - why are people treating defederation as this huge, dramatic freaking thing? (I actually think I know exactly why, but still curious to hear the rationale. Dazzle me, please.)

    “This newsletter is shite, I’ll stop subscribing”. That is the level of non-drama involved. Some instances post things that are categorically uninteresting, or have users that are significantly unable to behave. Defederating them is not a punishment or ethical consideration in itself - it’s just “I don’t want this automatically replicated onto my instance as a matter of routine”. Even if it weren’t, the ethical onus would be precisely equally on the other part to behave acceptably once federated with other instances. That is what federation means.

    • hakase@lemm.eeEnglish
      52·
      1 year ago

      why are people treating defederation as this huge, dramatic freaking thing? “This newsletter is shite, I’ll stop subscribing”.

      The problem is that it’s not one single person deciding to unsubscribe to a newsletter - it’s one single person deciding to unsubscribe hundreds to thousands of other people unilaterally.

      I don’t want other people deciding what I am or am not allowed to see, which is why I’m on lemm.ee in the first place. There are plenty of other instances out there that are more than happy to make all of your decisions for you if that’s what you want, but this is one of the very few larger instances not like that, and I’d prefer to keep it that way.