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?
Probably not saying anything new here, but my impression is that there’s two different problems, or rather levels of problem, to deal with:
For one point, Lemmy still does not have the level of activity that Reddit has, nor the types of content; this is particularly relevant for more niche subjects. I already made two magazines (“communities but on kbin”) for example and I’m still the only poster. It sucks, and it disincentivizes posting more. Discoverability and migrability are two aspects that a repost bot can help with, because if you have an interesting subject to discuss that’s already come up on Reddit (because, simply statistics, it’s so much more likely that it’d come up on Reddit), you can still have the content here and discuss it here. It can, eventually and hopefully, help bootstrap the local community to the level that a repost bot wouldn’t be needed.
There’s also the issue that for the above to have value, a repost bot has to actually repost not just the opening post but also enough comments to open up a subject of discussion. So less “repost”, more “mirror”. A bot that only posts a link to a Reddit thread, or a copy of an opening post that usually only has a link to an external site anyway, such as news posts or art posts, is of not much help for anything.
Ironically, this means (to me at least) a repost bot needs to be more active to be useful.
Now, can people just crosspost or repost manually? Sure, but a bot helps with that. Not everyone is that invested on having to start conversations, not everyone has to be a “content generation soldier”: when I go to a library, 90% of the time is to read a book, not to make annotations on their books (before I get kicked out) let alone to write my own book.
What does that mean for the lemmy perspective of things, from my end? Well, I don’t think defederating from an instance that also happens to repost Reddit (or whoever else, say, Wikimedia) content as part of their normal operations is a good idea, because by definition you are closing down to much more than that. Someone somewhere else can have come up the idea to discuss subject A; and we should not punish our own users for not having had the idea of doing so ourselves. Defederating from an instance that is dedicated to reposts, and that only does that, however, would have more sense, the more if they also engage in other spam behaviour.
I think personally a better solution, if Lemmy can implement it or already does, is to de-prioritize link posts in the All and Local views, and have the option in searches to sort or categorize posts by the level of interaction from local users (eg.: ratio of local users discussing a post that has been made to the local instance) besides the “best of” options (which I assume are valued merely by upvotes?) in search.