I’d like to lead my thoughts with a quote from sunarus 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?
Repost bots are no better than spam bots IMHO, but I think defederation needs to be based on bad behavior by the admins, not the accounts themselves.
In the case of lemmit.online, yeah, they are creating a bunch of communities that ONLY the bot can post in, and the posts get no replies because what’s the point in replying to TIFU or AITA if OP will never see it?
That’s clearly the fault of the admin, but OTOH, blocking bot@lemmit.online solves the problem without full defederation.
There’s a food community I read that gets spambots from lemm.ee all the time only posting affiliate links.
Those get reported for spam and blocked, but it’s clearly not the policy of lemm.ee so no reason to defederate.
I’m going to keep echoing this argument: just blocking the user is a shitty solution, because now new users are going to be alienated, especially if they browse by new.
Your example of spambots posting from lemm.ee break down fast because, you said it: we ban the spam bot. Lemmit.online is nothing but spam, all the time
If lemmit.online were a community within lemm.ee, it would be removed
Oh, I definitely see the argument, but I’d start by blocking everything by the bot, then if the admins decide to skirt the block with bot2@lemmit.online then the only real answer is defederation.
“Let me tell you about this thing called Lemmy, it’s great! But first, here’s a list of users you need to block to make it useable. Also, you have to do it from a web browser on a decent computer with decent internet because you’re going to try and load a profile with 1000000 posts.
Once you’ve jumped through those hoops you’ll be able to see the actual content that’s posted on Lemmy”
^this is not a good way to bring someone into the fediverse
Thanks for posting this, OP.
I have heard this negative feedback regarding the repost instances many times from several users, and conversely, I have not heard any positive feedback about those instances at all.
At the moment, my perception is that these instances universally disliked here, and as they are objectively having a negative effect on lemm.ee through effectively creating a ton of spam without any real discussion, perhaps we should indeed consider defederating. I would really appreciate if people who actually enjoy content from those instances could share their thoughts here!
I would really appreciate if people who actually enjoy content from those instances could share their thoughts here!
Well that’s the trick, isn’t it? They don’t engage with the bot posts, if they were enjoying them then wouldn’t they engage?
One counterpoint is that these bots offer a way to “browse Reddit content” without giving Reddit anything. And if browsing posts is the only thing one is after, one could enjoy the content but not interact with it, not even an upvote nor a subscription (to the repost community).
However, I don’t know of any way of measuring such interactions other than people telling us that they do.
Personally speaking though, the best, or worst, or perhaps spiciest part of reddit posts are in the comments. Just the post, without the comments providing the meat of it to me is kinda empty.
I’m fine either way since I rarely, if ever, encounter such Reddit reposts from bots. I’ve never subscribed to such, and I almost never encounter them in the wilds of “All.”
Perhaps it would be useful to look at the subscriber numbers for these communities? Maybe contact some of those subscribers directly, since they are the ones who requested the content in the first place? I would venture that people interested in a non-interactive firehose of links is probably a lurker and wouldn’t respond here.
If a lot of these communities have one subscriber, It could be that someone subscribed just to get the community on All.
I’m generally of the view that defederation to curate content is a bad idea. I’ve seen suggestions to have the ability for an instance to exclude certain communities from All, or maybe Lemmy needs a semi curated Popular feed like Reddit.
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.
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:
- Allow the community to control most aspects of the bot behavor.
- Do not upload/add to queue unless initated by a lemmy user
- Allow users to vote on post deletion, add resistance or disable if there are many non bot comments.
- Allow users to vote on the bot’s upload speed and what gets priority (up/down vote this comment)
- Pin an admin post to act like a “settings menu” for the project
- Pin an unintrucive admin comment in every post to vote on actions for the post
- Use as little boilerplate as possable. Hide in spoiler what you cant avoid.
- Use one bot account for uploads, one blocked user blocks the whole service.
- Put human and machine readable metadata of the original and repost in a spoiler.
- 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.
- Call the bot somthing like “reddit archive” put source’s username in the post/comment body
- Allow off instance admins to moderate bot posts
- Prefix all communities with somthing like "auto: " for transparency
- Allow partial reuploads and omition of threads for admin/data cleanup purposes.
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.
Personally just my experience. The respost bot lowers my experience, and I’ve used lemmy less because of it
I don’t personally find these bot posts useful, and I think they clutter up the All timeline, but they aren’t being deceitful or anything, and there may be folks who find these posts useful. I like the lemm.ee federation policy of generally allowing everything unless it’s full of bad actors.
It’s annoying because in some instances a repost bot makes sense, specifically where content and comments are a bit more asynchronous.
Some kinds of news for example- having an article reposted isn’t really terrible because we’re all just going to the same article then posting comments on our respective platforms.
But posts where op is expecting any kind of reply are dead in the water once they’re posted here, they just take up space and clutter up the timeline.
For what it’s worth you can just block the two bots that are spamming reposts and you’ll never see these posts again.
attempting to block them from a mobile app will usually crash the app.
I haven’t had this experience, it blocked just fine.