Asklemmy

Or even better - what if they need to request specific bots? That is: the bot needs human consent to act on first place. That means that bots will be only used if they're clearly useful for the instance, community or the user, not just a "yeah this bot is annoying and adding noise but why bother?"

mastodon already has botsin.space, depending on how well lemmy & masto interoperate (in theory they'll be fine because AP, but these kinda things tend to mess up in practice. lemmy still doesn't do authorized fetch afaik) hosting bots there & calling them from lemmy should work.

That's actually a really bright idea. Makes bots easier to identify, and easier to avoid if preferred.

I would have never guessed how to request the bot, if you didn't show it. That's another reason why I think that there should be a standard way to request bots, it increases discoverability. For contrast, Roboragi:

• {this} looks for anime
• looks for manga
• ]this[ looks for light novel
• |this| looks for visual novel

You probably wouldn't guess it from the fanfic link summary bot either.

I think that a simple common syntax that could be used is @!bot-name [options] ["]data to process["], at least when users are requesting it regardless of community. It's hard to hit it by accident, but still easy to type, and flexible enough to allow multiple bots to follow it. So for example:

• @!fanfic-link-bot ao3 STORYID // looks for STORYID in Archive of Our Own
• @!animanga-bot ln "story name" // looks for a light novel called "story name"
• @!units-converter-bot grams "five cups of flour" // converts five cups of flour into grams
• etc.

Then if community moderators are allowed to call bots to perform functions automatically, without the user requesting them, they could also set up synonyms as shorthands. for example people in c/fanfiction could simply type "ffao3 STORYID" instead, less keystrokes for the same result.

...wow.

I just installed it. I was expecting something like "ah, it knows that a cup should be a certain amount of mililitres, but what if I ask it in grams? Then I put "1 cup sugar", "grams"... and it returned 200g. It couldn't find flour so I used butter, 226g. It works!

Checking /usr/share/units/definitions.units, the devs had the insight to add a lot of cooking stuff to it. Also a way to define your own units. The syntax is an arse but I guess that the bot could handle it.

This would be great as the "guts" of a really good conversion bot.

I can’t see your fictional American thinking to trigger the bot - which means someone would have to reply to that person to request a bot conversion.

I think that they would, given enough community encouragement to do so; things like "OP, please add @!cookunitsbot to your post" go a long way. Roboragi in r/manga for example works well in this way.

Alternatively, if my "I think" above is wrong: then "requested" could also include "explicitly set up by the mods", not just "triggered by the user". For me it already solves the main issue, that is bots chasing you across communities to boss you around or vomit trivia.

Similarly, there’s a music IDing bot on reddit that responds to human-language questions like “whats the song” which is 100% ok with me (and the users have always been pleasantly surprised from what I’ve seen).

Frankly I think that having a standard way to request bots is better for everyone (including the bot developers) than having it reply human questions. Even then, as long as it doesn't do this thing outside of its own "turf" (music communities), it should be fine.

Tracking upvotes and good not/bad not replies is helpful feed back to, capturing that seem like a good idea