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?
Just today I blocked a bot and a very active user (?) because they clutter my feed.
I mostly blame the poor Lemmy algorithms. I select "New Comments" and still get 33% posts with 0 comments and 1 points, shared between two accounts. I'd rather see a post from yesterday with actual engagement.
Yes, I very much agree with the general lemm.ee policy. But I also found your argument convincing:
Trying to be constructive, I have two thoughts:
To address your 2nd point, lemmit.online addresses that in their FAQ, they won’t tone down the posting and suggest defederating if you dislike the automated content
Gross.
Why is it gross? They're posting things on their own server as a service to users who want it. They're not being dishonest or deceitful about it.
I question how many users actually want it, and want it that way.
On the other side, it annoys other people so much they consider defederation, beyond blocking.
Yes, they have the right to do what they want on their server alright. I still think one should be mindful of your own impact on society.
I guess in this case I'd like it to be opt-in. Like an hourly newsletter. Technically cool to offer it, unless it's opt-out. But Lemmy doesn't work that way, right?
I know my personal persuasion to the defederation question and knowing I’m biased, kept it to myself. It’s their instance and they must know they run the risk of other instances defederating because of their choices. I did however, post my personal feels and left it at that for a reason, but since you asked. why not? Because I was actually enjoying not having this instance becoming another *eddit and *eta so soon. I like the general tone and generally more thoughtful and thought provoking conversations here. Yes, I’m here for self-expression, and I like learning beyond my own nation’s narrative, and - I’m here for the memes, too. Just not so repetitively that that consumes most of the time I spend here; there are other places for that.
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