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?
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!
Thanks for boosting the discussion, I’m curious to see if anyone enjoys these bots as well. Thanks for all your efforts 🙏
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 know I accidentally subbed to some when I was looking for communities to add to my feed. I need to go through and remove them now that I know what they are.
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.”
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.
I generally agree, ill add that to the post.
Edit: oh, it was written but poorly explained that it should be its own instance.
Allow off instance admins to moderate bot posts
I vote nay to defederation (as I almost always will). If a problem can be solved simply by blocking two bots, then there is no need whatsoever to resort to defederation.
I understand your “new user” problem argument, but I think it’s really a non-issue. Lemmy already has a much higher learning curve than a site like reddit, and I think the number of people who aren’t put off by Lemmy’s learning curve but are put off having to figure out how to block two users is pretty close to the empty set.
Possible alternative that doesn’t involve defederating: Banning those two bot accounts from lemm.ee. That way, any users on those sites would still be able to participate in posts here.
… Though, I’m not sure how many of those there actually are. Looking at the sidebar, zerobytes.monster has had 18 users in the last 6 months, and lemmit.online a grand total of 1 user in the last 6 months.
i don’t think you can subscribe to lemmit.online, the only user is the bot, and the only purpose of the instance is to archive stuff.
You can always ban users. Still, instances with a culture specifically promoting those users (such as instances dedicated to reposting from Reddit, or a hypothetical instance that is hell-bent on trolling everyone) will make sure you have a steady amount of work maintaining that banning policy indefinitely. Defederating makes a lot more sense because moderator time and attention are finite resources.
This is actually a super good idea
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.
This. Cross posting from /r/AITA and /r/relationships is worse than pointless.
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
Blocking them on Voyager on Android works for me. :)
But I think it’s reasonable to tell people to use the search to find communities that interest them, curate your home feed, and be aware that diving into the “All Federated Content” feed will show you stuff that’s a) not particularly useful or b) potentially offensive to your sensibilities.
It took me way longer to get fed up with bot@lemmit.online than I’d really like to admit, and I only blocked them when it became clear they weren’t going to stop. I could see other people enjoying the feed… but then why don’t they comment? 🤔
Voyager on iPhone shits the bed when trying to open their user profile, zerobyte.monster is the one I haven’t been able to block yet
I had the same experience. I had to use the lemm.ee default web interface to block the two repost bots.
Huh, I went looking for it just now and can’t find it, so either I already blocked it or maybe lemmy.one already defederated from it? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But yeah… bad administration needs defederation. Bad users need blocking/reporting.
lemmy.world got a bunch of heat from defederating from hexbear pre-emptively, but it seems like that was the right call. Then they got ddossed after defederating from pirate communities. Not saying that’s CAUSATIVE, just “interesting”. ;)
Yeah, I don’t want to defed from hexbear or pirate communities though they’re fun
But I think it’s reasonable to tell people to use the search to find communities that interest them, curate your home feed, and be aware that diving into the “All Federated Content” feed will show you stuff that’s a) not particularly useful or b) potentially offensive to your sensibilities.
I was just using lemmy explorer to look for communities and didn’t realize some were just bots cross posting until I looked again later in my feed. I was disappointed.
My 2 cents: Ideally, there could be other options like:
- Better default sorting algorithm that penalizes those bot posts.
- Filters for global feeds (mainly “new” in this case): you could still see their posts in their communities, but not on the global feeds.
- (?) Default list of blocked users when you sign up on a given instance: you could unblock them if you want, but new users will not see their spam.
I’m of the opinion that defederating should be the last option but, given the current features, I don’t see any better way :(.
Again - why are people treating defederation as this huge, dramatic freaking thing? (I actually think I know exactly why, but still curious to hear the rationale. Dazzle me, please.)
“This newsletter is shite, I’ll stop subscribing”. That is the level of non-drama involved. Some instances post things that are categorically uninteresting, or have users that are significantly unable to behave. Defederating them is not a punishment or ethical consideration in itself - it’s just “I don’t want this automatically replicated onto my instance as a matter of routine”. Even if it weren’t, the ethical onus would be precisely equally on the other part to behave acceptably once federated with other instances. That is what federation means.
Defederation is a big deal because it’s a solution that acts like a bomb, indiscriminate and destructive.
“I don’t like this” great. Lots of people don’t like stuff, and they shouldn’t sub to stuff they don’t like, and unsub or block users and communities they don’t like.
The problem is that someone is making a final decision for everyone on that instance, about everyone on the other instance.
Person A on instance A doesn’t like something Person B on instance B said. So they call for defederate. Suddenly, nobody on Instance A can see anything anyone on Instance B says and vice versa. Person C on instance A wasn’t offended, Person D on Instance A liked Person B’s content. Persons E and F on Instance B are perfectly fine people who never did anything wrong.
But nope, Person A defederates, and now nobody on either instance can talk unless they want to either hop around instances trying to find instances that are neutral to both(and there is such a thing as “guilt by association” on the fediverse so Instances might defederate just for not defederating with Instance B), or they’ll need to have a bunch of accounts to get onto a bunch of different parts of the fediverse.
Defederation in anything but the most extreme of circumstances is actively damaging to the fediverse. Prior to the reddit migration, most lemmy instances were highly trigger happy with defederation, and fairly ban happy too. Thus, the system just stagnated. People still actively avoid the threadiverse because nobody wants to be walking on eggshells wondering what incorrect political opinion is going to get everyone on their instance dumped.
It’s particularly bad with lemmy, because communities are server-centered instead of being decentralized. If you’re subscribed to a bunch of communities on an instance and that instance defederates from you, then you’re not only disconnected from the people on that instance, you’re disconnected from all the other people on all the other instances connected to that community.
So rather than “I’m unsubscribing from this newsletter I don’t like”, it’s “I don’t like some of the articles in this newsletter, so I’m going to force everyone on my block to unsubscribe whether they want to or not”
why are people treating defederation as this huge, dramatic freaking thing? “This newsletter is shite, I’ll stop subscribing”.
The problem is that it’s not one single person deciding to unsubscribe to a newsletter - it’s one single person deciding to unsubscribe hundreds to thousands of other people unilaterally.
I don’t want other people deciding what I am or am not allowed to see, which is why I’m on lemm.ee in the first place. There are plenty of other instances out there that are more than happy to make all of your decisions for you if that’s what you want, but this is one of the very few larger instances not like that, and I’d prefer to keep it that way.
It’s cool to block protonmail because a lot of bitcoin scams are from there until your nan gets her email address there
I’m at the point where I think all bot accounts need to just be banned from Lemmy. If we’re trying to build engagement, a constant stream of reposts or a straight up rss feed is not helping.
Personally just my experience. The respost bot lowers my experience, and I’ve used lemmy less because of it
User of those bots here:
I think this whole problem stems from the lack of tools to configure bot experience. On mastodon, for example, bots can post “unlisted” posts – which don’t show up in the main feed. Only subscribed people receive their posts. On Lemmy there’s no such privacy toggle and admins are forced to shoot a fly with cruise missiles – by defederating instances
I’d understand if you folks decide to defederate from bot instances however I’d urge you to escalate this discussion upstream to LemmyNet github for following features
- post privacy i.e. intended reach
- moderation tools to handle bots activity en masse
This would be far more lasting impact on quality of global fediverse feed and efficient use of admins’ time IMO
Thus far you’re the only person in the thread I’ve seen that uses the bots. How do you implement them and how do they improve your Lemmy experience?
Firstly, I totally understand people who find reposts annoying and I have blocked few of those because they’re simply irrelevant to me
lemmit online / hackernews reposts
- those help drive inspiration for post making: I can snatch best ideas and post my own version on lemmy
It’s especially helpful when you’re maintaining inactive community where you’re the only poster – since inactive subs are seen as dead ones. - not my use case, but I see those instances as ability to combat FOMO for the users who just switched over to lemmy and getting used to its quirks. No need to snoop to reddit if its content is in your feed either way
- mastodon got almost a dozen of such repost instances from twitter and it’s enormous bonus in transition from birdsite
- if you see lemmit online posts then someone on your instance wants this content/subscribed to it – it doesn’t appear out of nowhere
controversial opinion
tbh I wish each lemmy sub would have its own bot to post content stolen from other places of internet. Almost all popular websites have ones and they do bring large audiences. Be it just memes, science news or animal photos: people stick with a website because they can regularly get their dopamine hit. “Normal people” i.e. lurkers usually don’t care about post originality. People simply want enough good quality content
QoL bots
- tldr bots are generally helpful for long reads\vids and I wish they would be available as option on post creation page
- bots for linking to invidious instances / archive.ph nonpaywalled articles: just saves time
P.S. as a bonus here’s a page about bots that wikipedia uses to streamline and automate work Wikipedia bots - Wikipedia
- those help drive inspiration for post making: I can snatch best ideas and post my own version on lemmy
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.
But would you say that blocking them improved your Lemmy experience?
For sure, I had 0 interest in repost bots.
Well yeah, of course. If you don’t want to see them then just block them.
I find those 2 bots just spam
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.
Folks, can we simply uncheck option “[x] Show Bot Accounts” in new user profiles by default? (same as with “[x] Show NSFW”)
No, because not all bots are terrible
Just today I blocked a bot and a very active user (?) because they clutter my feed.
I mostly blame the poor Lemmy algorithms. I select “New Comments” and still get 33% posts with 0 comments and 1 points, shared between two accounts. I’d rather see a post from yesterday with actual engagement.
Yes, I very much agree with the general lemm.ee policy. But I also found your argument convincing:
These bots ruin the experience on Lemmy for new users.
Trying to be constructive, I have two thoughts:
- Can we hear opinions in favor of these accounts with thousands of posts, most of which are 1 points, 0 comments?
- How about reaching out to these accounts, asking them to post less, or less non-engaging stuff?
To address your 2nd point, lemmit.online addresses that in their FAQ, they won’t tone down the posting and suggest defederating if you dislike the automated content
Gross.
Why is it gross? They’re posting things on their own server as a service to users who want it. They’re not being dishonest or deceitful about it.
I question how many users actually want it, and want it that way.
On the other side, it annoys other people so much they consider defederation, beyond blocking.
Yes, they have the right to do what they want on their server alright. I still think one should be mindful of your own impact on society.
I guess in this case I’d like it to be opt-in. Like an hourly newsletter. Technically cool to offer it, unless it’s opt-out. But Lemmy doesn’t work that way, right?
I know my personal persuasion to the defederation question and knowing I’m biased, kept it to myself. It’s their instance and they must know they run the risk of other instances defederating because of their choices. I did however, post my personal feels and left it at that for a reason, but since you asked. why not? Because I was actually enjoying not having this instance becoming another *eddit and *eta so soon. I like the general tone and generally more thoughtful and thought provoking conversations here. Yes, I’m here for self-expression, and I like learning beyond my own nation’s narrative, and - I’m here for the memes, too. Just not so repetitively that that consumes most of the time I spend here; there are other places for that.
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