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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Bots are not inherently evil. If they do something valuable for the community, and work as intended, they can be very helpful. While I'm not familiar with the details, that looks to be a product release post - which (depending on the community) can be very useful to automate.
The problem is that we have all been flooded with useless, low-quality shitpost bots. Reddit was full of them - like the one that would reply if your post was in alphabetical order. Naturally, we want to avoid/limit that as much as possible around here. But I'm also not as concerned - Lemmy doesn't have the incentives that Reddit did, specifically there's no karma.
On Lemmy, we just have to treat them the same as any other bad actor. We can block them individually, mods can ban them from that community, their instance can ban them, and our instance(s) can defederate with theirs. Due to the high demand for this feature, I expect we'll be able to individually block instances in the near future.
Most of the really useful bots don't actually make posts. They work in the background and, if they are like notification things like the reminder bot, they PM whoever called them. I don't think I have ever seen a useful bot that comments or posts publicly.