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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.
Re turning off bot accounts, keep in mind labeled bots probably serve a specific purpose. So turning off bots can result in a poorer user experience.
For example I have bot accounts that post weekly discussion threads for TV shows or discussion threads for films.
If you turn off all bots then you'll never see these discussion threads. (I've seen this happen, users starting a duplicate discussion thread because they hid all bot accounts.)
I would recommend blocking bot accounts you find annoying vs blocking all bots.
This is an excellent point. Thanks for taking the time to add this!
I just have bots disabled on my account. I suggest you try that too
Only works with honest bots though
Which, funnily, are probably the bots you'd be fine seeing.
Yup, that was my point
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
