[Lemmy.ca Discussion] What should we do about Lemmit.online
@[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.
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.
Yeah, no offense to the admins who I'm sure are just trying to do their users right, but stuff like this is making me see the value of running my own instance, or at perhaps finding a more hands-off one. It's weird to me that instance admins (or popular votes) make the decisions about what content I get to have access to.
Since this is one “bad” actor and not the case that the entire instance is composed of bad actors, I would prefer banning or blocking over defederating.
Since the intention of the bot seems to be non-malicious, and since the individual has the means, I think it should be left to the individual to decide to block.
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.
I already actively scroll past the obvious reddit reports, and that's all that instance brings to the table. I'm usually hesitant about defederating but in this case it seems to be the best choice if we don't want this content around, and they even encourage it if that's how we feel.
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.
I originally felt that option 2 would be the best since it would give us the most freedom and power.
However there is another important perspective. If there was a spammer in a community, then a solution isn’t just to “not look”, since it negatively affects other members of the community who might look. It’s our responsibility to make the community better (obviously there is some subjectivity to that).
Another point is that bandwidth is not free. This is a choice that clutters up the community and lessens the ability for others to communicate.
Finally there is no loss of information. If people want Reddit posts they can go there.
I agree with option 1. Lemmy is not Reddit and it should not be a Reddit copycat. These types of bots have no place in Lemmy and we need to deferate with instances that promote these kind of bots.
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.
Defederating would block the entire lemmit.online instance, including all their communities and users. Banning the bot would only block the one user account. According to their FAQs though there is currently only the one user so it would have the same effect, but they might make other user bots in the future.
definite preference is 3. If you leave it to individual users you likely will have to continue dealing with reports, but I don't think instance bans are very friendly and would only recommend in cases where traffic to/from the instance is causing resource issues on your server.
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.
I was browsing though that instance and realized I haven't seen a blatenly fake and terrible post in weeks when I came across one that was titled along the lines of "I love the smell of my vagnina after my boyfriend cums in me".
Holy crap the posting quality on Reddit nose dived over the years and I didn't notice.
I agree that defederating and banning the bot are effectively the same. Defederating seems a bit cleaner to me, so that's what I voted for.
If people really want the content they can still go directly to the instance and get it. I know that seems to go against the grain of the fediverse and I'm still struggling with that.
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 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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
Honestly, not that much for me now. But it would improve the user experience for newer people joining the instance. Also if more instances defederate it may lead to the admin of that one shutting it down, or at least changing it to not be a Reddit spam bot instance.
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?
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.
An opt out block list would be great for this. New users don't get inundated with one way bot generated content, but if you want to monitor a verbose bot you can. Sort of an opt in.
Actually now that I say that, just set up a community, and have the bit post to the community. Subscribe to the community to get the bot's posts, don't to not see them.
Hang on, but that community would still show up in the "All" feed wouldn't it. Hmmm. Okay, I see the dilemma.
There are no other users on lemmit.online, and the bot didn't post to any communities outside of lemmit.online. Defederating and banning the bot are functionally identical.
I don't think losing access to all the helpful bots is the right solution. Go take a look at the lemmit instance description. They have no users, just the repost bot. Defederation is not going to hurt anyone.
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.
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 think the bot account is already flagged as one, and going to its profile shows you it has been made to crosspost from Reddit. I guess it makes sense to ban it at a per-user level because some users might like to see content cross posted from there.
There should be governance around bot creation given the impact they can have. You shouldn't stop their creation but they should have clear ownership to a user otherwise what's stopping someone making a CP bot and running it out of North Korea or some shit?
We are all in on an experiment right now. Rules need to exist and they need to be enforced.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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 @[email protected] as well? Is it doing the same thing?
Just glancing through it, it looks like it. I'd defederate from that instance, too. It seems to just be cloning certain popular Reddit subreddits and auto-postink their posts to lemmy.link.
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.
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 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.