A new user comes to Lemmy and sees nothing but the same posts they saw on Reddit, but now all of them have no comments and almost no upvotes because there’s so much of it posted to such a small environment that everything else gets drowned out.
After blocking every one of the dogshit bots I see just as many quality posts, by actual users, with actual comments.
Eventually I can see getting rid of them, but for now they’re keeping Lemmy active.
Do a multitude of automated posts without comments and conversation really count as activity? Before I simply hid bot posts via settings, I'd rarely see any conversations appearing on Reddit reposts. Even now if you look at probably the most prolific bot instance/account behind this, Lemmit.online bot, you can see this for yourself.
Interesting archival project, I suppose, but it certainly doesn't seem to generate activity in terms of conversation, besides posts like this.
Do a multitude of automated posts without comments and conversation really count as activity?
Yes, absolutely. Posts are activity just as much as comments - arguably even more so, since Lemmy is not immune to Reddit's flaw of having a hundred comments saying essentially the same thing. Some subreddits have insightful comments that are worthwhile in-and-of themselves - but they are few and far between.