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?

  •  Kalcifer   ( @Kalcifer@lemm.ee ) 
    2•1 year ago

    I would vote nay for defederating from them. While I personally found their content annoying, someone else may actually find it uesful. I blocked the users, and the problem was solved. This issue may arise again, however, if more spam users pop up on these instances than a single user could reasonably be expected to deal with. This could possibly, again, be fixed by the user blocking the instance, but this would have to wait for user-blocking of instances to be implemented.

    •  HelloHotel   ( @HelloHotel@lemm.ee ) 
      1•1 year ago

      Im generally on the side of reposting for archival and continuation. however, the “throw it out there” half-assed ness and lack of transparency of these services make it a no deal. If I were to remake one (and ive thoght about it) a simple “upload and done” approach is discusting. These bots (clarified: probably should create their own instance for the task) need communal love and care to be anything but “a fire hose of content”. I propose the following:

      1. Allow the community to control most aspects of the bot behavor.
      2. Do not upload/add to queue unless initated by a lemmy user
      3. Allow users to vote on post deletion, add resistance or disable if there are many non bot comments.
      4. Allow users to vote on the bot’s upload speed and what gets priority (up/down vote this comment)
      5. Pin an admin post to act like a “settings menu” for the project
      6. Pin an unintrucive admin comment in every post to vote on actions for the post
      7. Use as little boilerplate as possable. Hide in spoiler what you cant avoid.
      8. Use one bot account for uploads, one blocked user blocks the whole service.
      9. Put human and machine readable metadata of the original and repost in a spoiler.
      10. Use 8 or so well labeled “sorting bot accounts” to aproimate upvotes of the source relative to its negboring ccomments. Should be no more sway than ±8 votes. Bot votes Should be disclosed in the metadata.
      11. Call the bot somthing like “reddit archive” put source’s username in the post/comment body
      12. Allow off instance admins to moderate bot posts
      13. Prefix all communities with somthing like "auto: " for transparency
      14. Allow partial reuploads and omition of threads for admin/data cleanup purposes.
      •  Kalcifer   ( @Kalcifer@lemm.ee ) 
        1•1 year ago

        Im generally on the side of reposting for archival and continuation.

        Unless an instance has been built with the intention of archiving information, I don’t think that it should be automatically expected that an instance would be in favor of archiving posts from other platforms – there already exists services that archive internet data, and they are better equipped to do so. An instance should outline in their rules whether or not they support such types of posts.