this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Lemmy.ca's Main Community

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Since everyone on lemmy.ca gets subscribed here, this is the place to chat about the goings on at lemmy.ca, support-type items, suggestions, etc.

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@[email protected] has been subject to multiple reports from our users over the last while.

We would like the users' input on how to deal with it. It is the opinion of the administrators that @[email protected], and @lemmit.online doesn't add anything positive and constitutes spam. We especially want to make sure we get feedback as we are more likely to be sensitive to bots like this and other forms of spam compared to most users as we'll often scroll through "All" sorted by new.

Here are the options.

Please vote by up voting on one of the comments below. Downvotes will be ignored. Additional comments and discussion is more than welcome. Results of this discussion will provide us guidance on how to deal with other bots in the future as well.

If you're not a lemmy.ca registered user, please refrain from voting but feel free to comment with your opinion.

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[–] [email protected] 143 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)
[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Letting users block for themselves was my choice. Lemmy is very customizable and the fewer decisions I have made for me, the better off I feel I am.

For some users, this bot may help ease the transition from Reddit. If you don't like it, it's quite simple to block.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

This is my choice. I'd prefer defederating is more of a last resort. And we can choose for ourselves what to do.

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[–] [email protected] 129 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)
  • option 1: Defederate from Lemmit.Online
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Option 2 is cool in regards to letting users decide... Option 3 is my second choice that said.

That said I ultimately agree with option 1. An instance dedicated to just regurgitating content from another user-generated site is just not a good thing. There is 0 value to those posts on Lemmy, instance wide imo.

There is 0 way to interact with the posts in a meaningful way and they just fill up 'new' with crap from somewhere else.

I don't like the nuclear option of defederation, but I really just see that instance as a hindrence to the existence and natural growth on Lemmy.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

If you you don’t want anyone else on your server to be exposed to this bot/instance, you should convince your admin to defederate from lemmit.online. Since there are no other users on here, there will be no harm done.

Reading the FAQ I have changed my mind to defederate.

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[–] [email protected] 66 points 1 year ago

After reading their FAQ I think we should defederate.

Here's a snippet

Q: This is spam, can you stop?

A: First of all, I apologise for the inconvenience. All you have to do is block @[email protected], and none of its posts will ever show up on your instance. If you you don’t want anyone else on your server to be exposed to this bot/instance, you should convince your admin to defederate from lemmit.online. Since there are no other users on here, there will be no harm done.

No users to offend

[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)
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[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago

I was leaning towards letting the individual user decide, but now vote to either defederate, or ban the bot.

I'm of the mind that this is where I go insteadof reddit. If there's going to be overlap between what gets posted over there, and on lemmy, I'd rather it gets posted by a person who wants to engage, and is invested in the post.

Additionally, I am not in favor of any bot that can potentially make me engage with reddit in any way.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago

I think that the active participation of members is how we get strong communities. One way to be an active participant is to take responsibility for what you want to see. If you don't like the bot, block it.

This is analogous to walking out of a movie you dislike rather than calling for it to be banned.

As far as I can tell, it's not breaking any terms of service or policy. That doesn't mean that terms of service and policy can't be modified, but that should be done only to address general principles, not specific cases. (Although it may be that a specific case makes obvious the need for change.)

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I wondered if there were many people on lemmit.online whose valuable contributions to the community would be cut off if we defederated, so I went over there and found this instance description:

A Reddit to Lemmy crossposting instance.

In other words, the whole place is a reddit copypasta bot. So banning the bot would be effectively the same as defederating from the instance, wouldn't it?

I prefer the way posts here feel more curated than on reddit, so to me, that bot is mostly just generating noise. But I can understand that some people who rely on social media for news and such might be more likely to spend time here if they can get all the posts in one place. So I'm voting to leave it up to the users. Blocking a single bot for myself is easy.

If it was putting problematic load on the server, though, I think I would consider it spam and vote to defederate.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Agreed. I need a Reddit repost bot like I need a hole in the head. Which means I really don't need it, in case anyone is wondering.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

On the plus side they're quite open and honest about what exactly they're doing. Its just up to people to decide if they want it or not.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

Block the bot just so new isn't wholly polluted by it. We need to generate our own content here, and signal to noise ratio is important to achieve that.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

I’m of the opinion that any account or instance that is dedicated to reposting Reddit content is spam.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

I vote either defederate or ban. Even if it is "technically legal" by the current rules, it goes completely against the spirit and intent of this place, and rules can and should be changed over time to preserve that. Bot/AI generated posts are exactly what we DON'T want this place to turn into, and it will take active effort to avoid that.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

Ban the bot.

Automated reposts that don’t get any interaction in the comments are just spam.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We really need a poll function in Lemmy. 🤭

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

With the ability to limit the poll to users of a specific instance and/or subscribers from a community (that were subscribed prior to the poll's creation).

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I'm not a part of this instance, but I wish mine would defederate from lemmit.online. It is definitely spam in my opinion. I've blocked the bot for now.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

We'll share this post with other instance admins once there's a bit more discussion, and maybe seeing this will get the ball rolling for other instances to have similar discussions.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've brought up the ethics of it elsewhere. Many of us are pissed reddit undeleted our content. Regardless of legality i belive we have a right to remove our content as we see fit. This bot is copying that content from reddit without consent of those who made it wich is just as bad. again though legal, it is still a dick move. If a reddit user had their content copied here and wanted to remove it we are demanding they build an account to do so, this is not a postive way to gain users. We came to lemmy because reddit was too unethical, need to maintain higher standard of ethicacy.

I'm voting to defederate.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I do not think it's fair to assume that everyone came to lemmy for the same reasons as you. I for one came because I didn't like the decisions they were making, not because I had any strong feelings about the ethics of those decisions.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Option 3, user bans.

196 is also spam but we're not banning that.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Defederation is too drastic.

Would it be possible instead for either communities to whitelist the bot if the wanted the content, or to speak with the developers for them to include a purposeful subscription to it rather than shotgun posting?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The bot is not posting to communities on lemmy.ca. It’s posting to lemmit.online. If any user on lemmy.ca subscribes to a community from lemmit.online, the bot’s posts will start to show up on the “all” homepage.

I’ve already blocked this bot on my account because i use the all page to find new communities. Before that bot was blocked, all I would see were the posts it made.

I agree with other users in this comment section that the admins should be as hands off as possible and leave it up to the users.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Have you considedred turning off SHOW BOT ACCOUNTS by default?

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

As others have said, de-federation should really be the last resort for the most egregious of actions. The bot serves a well-intended purpose, even if it's something I would never use.

What if the bot was hosted at .ml or .world? Would de-federation even be on the table?

My vote would be to leave it up to the users for now, though I don't fully understand what, if any, performance impact the bot account might have on other instances. Is traffic from that instance excessive? If performance was a factor, then at most I would vote to ban the bot account until the platform has more options to manage such things.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Option 4. Ask the Lemmy developers to provide mandatory flagging on bots so users can know who made the bot and why so they can make an educated decision and also enable them to then ban it on an individual basis if required.

If the bot is doing things to impact performance, or break Canadian law than the lemmy.ca instance gets the last call.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I'm using jerboa on Android. It has a check box in settings to allow/disallow bots in the feed. I haven't seen this mentioned bot, so I suppose it works.

But, if the bot is drowning out the feed for others it may be nice to block it at server level.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Personally I'm not a fan of automated content scrapers posting on Lemmy in general. I like to see what other people picked out and found interesting, even if they are reposting other sites. I've already blocked the bot user, but imo we should give that Reddit bot the

ban hammer.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I just noticed you added comments for voting.

Unfortunately that doesn’t work too well because the comments aren’t sticked and some options become less visible.

I think a straw poll would have been the better choice, despite you being unable to track votes from only our instance.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I had already commented on this post few days ago with my concerns about this bot. I feel it hinders the proper movement of users from rexxit by artificially keeping activity and attention tethered to the old site, discouraging the creation of (and participation in) new communities here.

I vote we de-federate from it and ignore it as much as possible.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I'd say just let each user to decide whether or not to ban the user.

It's super easy to do. Not an issue imo

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

My vote is to let users decide whether to block the bot or not.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I am pretty sure I have blocked it multiple times. It is utter spam.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It seems odd to me that these are often discussed at a "server wide" level. If a community doesn't like the posts they can ban the user no? Shouldn't the Administrators try to focus on running the site and gross rule violating content and not be involved in random bots?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The problem is that it can fill up the new feed for new users, so they end up seeing a ton of posts with no interaction on them.

I personally don't feel mass cloning of content from reddit over to lemmy, is going to help build a community. This isn't stumbleupon.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

That server has no users. Just the bot. So in tyhis case banning the server is effectively banning a single user. But also saves on resources when the lemmy.ca server doesn't need to fetch the posts that are blocked by a large percentage of the local users.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I don't get how it's a big debate when the guy's FAQ functionally boils down to saying "yeah this is spam and defederate if you don't like it" almost as if it's a challenge.

As much as I miss content in abundance to mindlessly doomscroll that was functionally why I left reddit.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Let's not turn into Beehaw with the de-federating from everything until there is no content left.

[–] techt 8 points 1 year ago

My take from an outside perspective: banning the one account seems like the sensible approach toward the goal of sending a stern message to the creator and establishing an early precedent -- one account is bad enough, imagine more. I think defederating should only be used if the creator doesn't take the hint and creates another account.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Seems they're already offline? I tried going directly to the site only to get a 502 Bad Gateway Error on a Cloudflare error screen.

In any case, if it's literally just bot spam, definitely defederate from it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I like to browse All as well ~~and haven't noticed that bot~~. If the issue is just with a single account, I think defederation seems unnecessary. Could you provide more information on the benefit for defederation versus banning the bot on Lemmy.ca? And I'm one of those people who prefer pledging defederation of Threads, so I support such a move depending on the situation.

EDIT: Correction, I checked my block list and that user account is in there. 😂

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I’ve already blocked it. Maybe a PSA explaining how to do that?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I think it simply makes sense to leave it up to users to block this if they don't like it. This approach allows for folks to achieve what they want without forcing this decision onto others.

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