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?
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”
The problem is that it’s not one single person deciding to unsubscribe to a newsletter - it’s one single person deciding to unsubscribe hundreds to thousands of other people unilaterally.
I don’t want other people deciding what I am or am not allowed to see, which is why I’m on lemm.ee in the first place. There are plenty of other instances out there that are more than happy to make all of your decisions for you if that’s what you want, but this is one of the very few larger instances not like that, and I’d prefer to keep it that way.
It’s cool to block protonmail because a lot of bitcoin scams are from there until your nan gets her email address there