Opinions wanted: defederating with bot spam instances

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee⁩ to ⁨meta@lemm.ee⁩

There are two that immediately spring to mind, zerobytes.monster’s b0t user, and lemmit.online

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.

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?

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Comments

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sunaurus@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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!

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- cerevant@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - cubedsteaks@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    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.
    
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- TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Thanks for boosting the discussion, I’m curious to see if anyone enjoys these bots as well. Thanks for all your efforts 🙏
  
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- jordanlund@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  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?
  
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  - megane_kun@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    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.”
    
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- Kalcifer@lemm.ee ⁨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 be expected to realistically 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.
  
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  - HelloHotel@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Im generally on the side of reposting for archival and continuation. however, the transparency and 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 awful
    
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hakase@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I vote nay to defederation (as I almost always will). If a problem can be solved simply by blocking two users, 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.

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TheGreatFox@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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- Rescuer6394@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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.
  
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- amio@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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.
  
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- TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  This is actually a super good idea
  
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jordanlund@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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- TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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.we break down fast because, you said it: we ban the spam bot. Lemmit.online is nothing but spam, all the time
  
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  - jordanlund@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    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.
    
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impiri@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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- TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    This. Cross posting from /r/AITA and /r/relationships is worse than pointless.
    
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LostDeer@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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amio@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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- sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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"
  
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- hakase@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
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- balls_expert@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  It’s cool to block protonmail because a lot of bitcoin scams are from there until your nan gets her email address there
  
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Crul@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
My 2 cents: Ideally, there could be other options like:

Better default sorting algorithm that penalizes those bot posts.

(?) 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 :(.
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graphito@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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
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- TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  This 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?
  
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  - graphito@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    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. 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 use to its quirks. No need to snoop to reddit if its content is in your feed either way
    
    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
    
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simple@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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- TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  It would you say that blocking them improved your Lemmy experience?
  
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  - simple@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    For sure, I had 0 interest in repost bots.
    
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  - WarmSoda@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Well yeah, of course. If you don’t want to see them then just block them.
    
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grimace1153@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Personally just my experience. The respost bot lowers my experience, and I’ve used lemmy less because of it

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binboupan@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I find those 2 bots just spam

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veniasilente@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Assuming “opinions wanted” includes those from other instances, here’s a very sh.itjust.works take regarding those Reddit repost bots…

It might have a legitimate use as a way to read Reddit without visiting Reddit, as others have posted, on the other hand I struggle to see the value of posting questions but not answers from the likes of r/buildapc. It feels like it’s trying to funnel people to Reddit to see the full discussion, which I would classify as commercial advertisement.

This traffic is staying on its home instance, they’re not posting to our communities where they’re subject to our instance rules.

It’s not exactly one user in one community but it’s not everyone including the admins either; there’s other legitimate traffic happening there, so there may be other means available.

On my home instance, this would require a proposal, discussion, and vote in the Agora; it doesn’t qualify for unilateral admin action. I suspect the vote would land Nay; I’ve seen and participated in a couple “Hey what’s up with those reposts from Reddit?” threads, but nothing came of it. So I think it’s below our threshold for action. Do with that what you will.
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graphito@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Folks, can we simply uncheck option “[x] Show Bot Accounts” in new user profiles by default?

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- TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  No, because not all bots are terrible
  
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IntegrationLabGod@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Anyone using Android having trouble blocking a user try the Liftoff app. It allows user blocking from the main page via the 3 dots menu. I’ve blocked a bunch of these annoying repost bots and it greatly enhances the Lemmy experience.

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StellarExtract@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I actually enjoy content from several of these repost bots and have submitted subs to repost. I think Lemmy is great, but it still is far behind in niche content. I think the bots are a great way of offering the content that’s missing vs Reddit. My only alternative would be going back to Reddit, which I don’t want to do. The whole reason I’m on Lemm.ee is its anti-defederation stance.

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willya@lemmyf.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It’s not that serious as those instances are all literally generated from one account that’s easily blockable.

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- TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  You violate the rules of lemm.ee
  
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  - willya@lemmyf.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    How so?
    
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paysrenttobirds@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Maybe there should be a “hidden” flag for users or instances, so as a new user you don’t see them but can change a setting at any time to include these hidden posts. Then users have the choice, but the instance gets to determine how it is seen by new users.

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- TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I think that’s be a good idea but that’s not something immediately actionable
  
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fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Lemmy could probably use an instance wide community and user block that can be overridden by the user if they prefer (and the admin allows that as a toggle). That way admins can choose a default that makes sense for their instance, but a user can opt out of those blocks if the admins allow it.

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- impiri@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Firefish (Mastodon-compatibile microblogging) has a view called “Recommended”, which is like “All” but shows posts from only federated servers that the admins recommend. It’s a great feature and would be welcome on Lemmy.
  
  In the meantime, I’ve blocked the two Reddit repost bot accounts and have been just fine since.
  
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Spzi@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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?
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- TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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
  
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  - Maeve@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Gross.
    
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HerbalGamer@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I blocked those bots after heaps of posts which only link to Reddit and had no engagement whatsoever.

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MargotRobbie@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Yeah, botspam from reddit is pretty terrible. I’ve expressed this at LW a while ago that the only way to have Lemmy be its own thing is to cut it off from reddit, so Lemmy’s original content can flourish. While this is my alt account, I think most instances should defederate from lemmit, since no one really comments on them anyways and it has shown itself to be unliked and unnecessary.

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WarmSoda@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I just block bots when I see them. I have no what the ones you’re talking about are.

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ME5SENGER_24@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
THE SPAM IS KILLING ME AND I CAN’T BLOCK THEIR STUPID BOT NO MATTER HOW HARD I TRY. DEFEDERATION IS THE ONLY OPTION

(Sorry for shouting)

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Dracocide@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Honestly, it’s kind of annoying. Had to block just to get rid of the major spam I was dealt with from lemmit.

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