[Lemmy.ca Discussion] What should we do about Lemmit.online

• option 2: leave it up to users to block @bot@lemmit.online

• option 1: Defederate from Lemmit.Online

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 @bot@lemmit.online, 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

• option 3: Ban @bot@lemmit.online from lemmy.ca

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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

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.

Ban the bot.

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

We really need a poll function in Lemmy. 🤭

Ban spam.

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.

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.

Option 3, user bans.

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

Have you considedred turning off SHOW BOT ACCOUNTS by default?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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. 😂

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

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.

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.

I'm in favour of defedding. It's just Reddit spam that's not needed here. If people find interesting things over on Reddit that also belong here, that's one thing, but there's no reason to make a 1:1 copy. Let Lemmy be Lemmy and let Reddit be Reddit. They don't have to be the same thing.

Has anyone noticed @linkbot@lemmy.link as well? Is it doing the same thing?

Let the users block the bot.

I vote block the account.

I’m from lemmy.world. What is this bot you’re talking about? I haven’t had the misfortune of running into it. What makes it spam?

Edit: Thanks everyone for your helpful answers! Based on the responses below, I believe you should definitely defederate.

I vote for the user block option.

I vote to ban the bot.

I haven’t noticed it yet, but if you feel it’s a big enough problem, I’d say block the account for now. Defederating feels like a more serious punishment that I’d reserve for multiple bad actors.

I think option 3.

Did lemmy.ca already defederate? I clicked the link to the link to block the bot it but it shows nothing there. Yet if I sign out, I can see it.

option 3 is my choice

Using the All+New sorting is practically useless because of 🫘 and equivalent noise whether this bot is alive or dead. From what I've seen New is only useful when combined with Subscribed or Local. On the basis of that I wouldn't take any action since people who might want to read this stuff won't be able to, and we'll not see a dramatic improvement to All+New.

Now that I know it exists, I might subscribe to several Canadian communities on lemmit to keep track of stuff that's not reflected here yet. Will probably repost what's interesting to our communities.

I vote defederate.

Defed for sure. If it provided a valuable service, some communities would have made it an official bot by now and I don't see that happening anywhere.

Here's a link to their FAQ in case anyone is interested

I vote to defederate.

I don't want to see spam and that is in great part why I validated my email and joined this instance. The great thing about being on Lemmy is I can go to another instance to view that content if I want to see it. I like having a variety of instances with different moderation levels.

The way I see it, the user is still in control. I'm on other instances; I'll still see the content if I want. Here, I want moderation curated towards user engagement. I left Reddit to avoid low-quality bot posts and I preferably don't want to think about bots all the time. It's exhausting and I don't want to play whack-a-mole. What I want to see are the things people are interested in straight from the users. I don't need doomscrolling reddit feeds sourced by bots again.

Edit for clarity, I hope!