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 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.

Possible alternative that doesn't involve defederating: Banning those two bot accounts from lemm.ee. That way, any users on those sites would still be able to participate in posts here.

... Though, I'm not sure how many of those there actually are. Looking at the sidebar, zerobytes.monster has had 18 users in the last 6 months, and lemmit.online a grand total of 1 user in the last 6 months.

I don’t personally find these bot posts useful, and I think they clutter up the All timeline, but they aren’t being deceitful or anything, and there may be folks who find these posts useful. I like the lemm.ee federation policy of generally allowing everything unless it’s full of bad actors.

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 at the point where I think all bot accounts need to just be banned from Lemmy. If we’re trying to build engagement, a constant stream of reposts or a straight up rss feed is not helping.

My 2 cents: Ideally, there could be other options like:

• Better default sorting algorithm that penalizes those bot posts.
• Filters for global feeds (mainly "new" in this case): you could still see their posts in their communities, but not on the global feeds.
• (?) Default list of blocked users when you sign up on a given instance: you could unblock them if you want, but new users will not see their spam.

I'm of the opinion that defederating should be the last option but, given the current features, I don't see any better way :(.

Personally just my experience. The respost bot lowers my experience, and I’ve used lemmy less because of it

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.

I find those 2 bots just spam

User of those bots here:

I think this whole problem stems from the lack of tools to configure bot experience. On mastodon, for example, bots can post "unlisted" posts -- which don't show up in the main feed. Only subscribed people receive their posts. On Lemmy there's no such privacy toggle and admins are forced to shoot a fly with cruise missiles -- by defederating instances

I'd understand if you folks decide to defederate from bot instances however I'd urge you to escalate this discussion upstream to LemmyNet github for following features

• post privacy i.e. intended reach
• moderation tools to handle bots activity en masse

This would be far more lasting impact on quality of global fediverse feed and efficient use of admins' time IMO

For what it's worth you can just block the two bots that are spamming reposts and you'll never see these posts again.

attempting to block them from a mobile app will usually crash the app.

I haven't had this experience, it blocked just fine.

Probably not saying anything new here, but my impression is that there's two different problems, or rather levels of problem, to deal with:

For one point, Lemmy still does not have the level of activity that Reddit has, nor the types of content; this is particularly relevant for more niche subjects. I already made two magazines ("communities but on kbin") for example and I'm still the only poster. It sucks, and it disincentivizes posting more. Discoverability and migrability are two aspects that a repost bot can help with, because if you have an interesting subject to discuss that's already come up on Reddit (because, simply statistics, it's so much more likely that it'd come up on Reddit), you can still have the content here and discuss it here. It can, eventually and hopefully, help bootstrap the local community to the level that a repost bot wouldn't be needed.

There's also the issue that for the above to have value, a repost bot has to actually repost not just the opening post but also enough comments to open up a subject of discussion. So less "repost", more "mirror". A bot that only posts a link to a Reddit thread, or a copy of an opening post that usually only has a link to an external site anyway, such as news posts or art posts, is of not much help for anything.

Ironically, this means (to me at least) a repost bot needs to be more active to be useful.

Now, can people just crosspost or repost manually? Sure, but a bot helps with that. Not everyone is that invested on having to start conversations, not everyone has to be a "content generation soldier": when I go to a library, 90% of the time is to read a book, not to make annotations on their books (before I get kicked out) let alone to write my own book.

What does that mean for the lemmy perspective of things, from my end? Well, I don't think defederating from an instance that also happens to repost Reddit (or whoever else, say, Wikimedia) content as part of their normal operations is a good idea, because by definition you are closing down to much more than that. Someone somewhere else can have come up the idea to discuss subject A; and we should not punish our own users for not having had the idea of doing so ourselves. Defederating from an instance that is dedicated to reposts, and that only does that, however, would have more sense, the more if they also engage in other spam behaviour.

I think personally a better solution, if Lemmy can implement it or already does, is to de-prioritize link posts in the All and Local views, and have the option in searches to sort or categorize posts by the level of interaction from local users (eg.: ratio of local users discussing a post that has been made to the local instance) besides the "best of" options (which I assume are valued merely by upvotes?) in search.

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:

1. Can we hear opinions in favor of these accounts with thousands of posts, most of which are 1 points, 0 comments?
2. How about reaching out to these accounts, asking them to post less, or less non-engaging stuff?

It’s not that serious as those instances are all literally generated from one account that’s easily blockable.

Anyone using Android having trouble blocking a user try the Liftoff app. It allows user blocking from the main page via the 3 dots menu. I've blocked a bunch of these annoying repost bots and it greatly enhances the Lemmy experience.

Assuming "opinions wanted" includes those from other instances, here's a very sh.itjust.works take regarding those Reddit repost bots...

• It might have a legitimate use as a way to read Reddit without visiting Reddit, as others have posted, on the other hand I struggle to see the value of posting questions but not answers from the likes of r/buildapc. It feels like it's trying to funnel people to Reddit to see the full discussion, which I would classify as commercial advertisement.
• This traffic is staying on its home instance, they're not posting to our communities where they're subject to our instance rules.
• It's not exactly one user in one community but it's not everyone including the admins either; there's other legitimate traffic happening there, so there may be other means available.

On my home instance, this would require a proposal, discussion, and vote in the Agora; it doesn't qualify for unilateral admin action. I suspect the vote would land Nay; I've seen and participated in a couple "Hey what's up with those reposts from Reddit?" threads, but nothing came of it. So I think it's below our threshold for action. Do with that what you will.

I just block bots when I see them. I have no what the ones you're talking about are.

Lemmy could probably use an instance wide community and user block that can be overridden by the user if they prefer (and the admin allows that as a toggle). That way admins can choose a default that makes sense for their instance, but a user can opt out of those blocks if the admins allow it.

I.E. a middle ground before defederation.

I actually enjoy content from several of these repost bots and have submitted subs to repost. I think Lemmy is great, but it still is far behind in niche content. I think the bots are a great way of offering the content that's missing vs Reddit. My only alternative would be going back to Reddit, which I don't want to do. The whole reason I'm on Lemm.ee is its anti-defederation stance.

Folks, can we simply uncheck option "[x] Show Bot Accounts" in new user profiles by default? (same as with "[x] Show NSFW")

Maybe there should be a "hidden" flag for users or instances, so as a new user you don't see them but can change a setting at any time to include these hidden posts. Then users have the choice, but the instance gets to determine how it is seen by new users.

Yeah, botspam from reddit is pretty terrible. I've expressed this at LW a while ago that the only way to have Lemmy be its own thing is to cut it off from reddit, so Lemmy's original content can flourish. While this is my alt account, I think most instances should defederate from lemmit, since no one really comments on them anyways and it has shown itself to be unliked and unnecessary.