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?
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 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.
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 defend from hexbear or pirate communities though they’re fun
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.
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.
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?
Well yeah, of course. If you don't want to see them then just block them.
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 :(.
Personally just my experience. The respost bot lowers my experience, and I’ve used lemmy less because of it
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.
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
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.
I just block bots when I see them. I have no what the ones you're talking about are.
I blocked those bots after heaps of posts which only link to Reddit and had no engagement whatsoever.
