I’ve recently seen bot accounts being used in various discussions, like:
@remindme@mstdn.social@ChatGPT@lemmings.world@AutoTLDR@programming.dev@CommunityLinkFixer@lemmings.world
It seems like there should be a way to discover these bots without having to first see them in use, but the Lemmy User search doesn’t offer an option to return bot accounts and (obviously) doesn’t provide useful results when searching “bot”.
Is there some way to discover them that I’m missing? Maybe using the Lemmy API? Failing some sort of automated curation, does a “Use(ful/less) Bots” community where bot authors may announce their bot exist?
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there’s also the bot that copies everything over from Reddit and seeing it on my all feed is the bane of my existence
It’s blockable fortunately - maybe not via whatever app your using, but if you log into your instance website with a browser, you can choose to block the bot (at) lemmit (dot) online
I did block it but damn it was annoying before i figured out how to do that
Unfortunately all subreddit mirror requests to that bot are auto-approved, and there is no subreddit subscriber limit. That means that very large subreddits with already-active Lemmy communities get mirrored. That causes unnecessary duplication and a lot of noise due to frequent posts to the subreddits.
That said, I actually subscribe to a few of that bot’s communities for tiny, niche subreddits (like with 5k Reddit subscribers) that I followed. I use it because it will take time for Lemmy to reach adoption capable of sustaining those very specialized communities. It’s useful for links (less so for discussions.)
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There really should be a “Bot accounts cannot post to this community” mod option.
What’s to stop someone from just not checking the ‘bot account’ option for their bot though?
The docs say:
Bot Account: Enable this if you are using a script or program to create posts automatically
So a bot account that doesn’t self-report would be a violation of policy and should be banned from the entire instance by the admin if discovered.
To be clear: I’m personally not against useful bots. But a “Bot accounts cannot post to this community” mod option would just allow the mods to choose for their community.
