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!
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
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)
Personally just my experience. The respost bot lowers my experience, and I’ve used lemmy less because of it
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.
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
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
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.
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”
It’s not that serious as those instances are all literally generated from one account that’s easily blockable.
You violate the rules of lemm.ee
