Hi,

I don’t post this to be malicious or rude, but simply out of concern.

I believe this bot is killing community growth on Lemmy. I keep coming across would-be-interesting communities only to find a wall of bot posts with zero comments, zero votes, zero engagement. And I walk away disappointed instead of getting into a new community. As, I’m sure, may other users are doing.

Sure, you say, “just block the bot” if I don’t like it. But that doesn’t stop this thing from stifling any real engagement and growth in communities. Surely if someone can “just…”, you can “just” go back to reddit if you want to read reddit content that badly.

I admire the engineering you put into making this thing work. It’s impressive, and honestly very cool. But I really think it’s actively disengaging users, when Lemmy has enough of a hurdle to overcome in growing new communities.

Thats just my 2 cents. I’m not sure it will mean much, but I felt I had to share it. Again, no ill intent against what you’ve accomplished in creating this. Best wishes.

  • Arthur BesseEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    I entirely agree and I highly recommend that most instances generally ban bots like this.

    But I’m not against people running them on instances where it is specifically welcomed, and I think other instances shouldn’t defederate the instances that do - we should just ban the bots and/or the remove the communities that consist entirely of bot posts.

    This way, any users who want to use a lemmy client (or website) to read a combined view of the lemmyverse-at-large plus some scraped subset of reddit can just make an account on one of the servers that is doing that.

    Human users of those instances should be able to participate in the larger lemmyverse, even if the bots are banned from the rest.

    I don’t see it in the modlog now, but I think it was me that banned @[email protected] from lemmy.ml a few months ago, and I just banned a similar one @[email protected] today (and sent basically the above suggestion to the operator of it).