Hi @MargotRobbie@lemmy.world - you already saw my post on this in the l4s thread but I thought it would be good to post it here too.

We agree that we don't want bots blindly importing from other news sources, be it reddit or others.

Bots in general should be allowed, as long as:

• they follow the lemmy.world guidelines on content moderation
• they have the approval from the community moderator/owner they post in
• they are clearly identifying as a bot
• they are not "spammy"
• they are not used for advertisement

Malicious bots and bots going against these rules should be reported and they will be banned.

memes are reposts though tbh

Strongly disagree. And I don"t think that this has anything to do with Reddit in particular.

The Fediverse is designed to host many different types of content. Some content is going to be content that one person or another doesn't like.

And that is fine. Those people don't need to consume that content. They don't have to look at that content.

But they should not be trying to prevent other people from looking at that content.

In your case, it sounds like you got into a disagreement with the moderators of a Fediverse community over what content should be in that community. End of the day, their role is to make that call. You don't like it, go make another community, and if users generally agree with you, they'll come to your community instead.

Yeah it I wanted Reddit I'd just go to Reddit. It's not like there's any engagement in those threads either ..

I block every reddit reposting bot I see. I left reddit for a reason.

I'd say they need curation.

There's thousands of posts getting botted over, but maybe five of those have useful content. Most of the time, the good stuff was in the comments. All that needs doing is a team going through what the bot posts and pruning the junk.

There have been some of those posts that were more than just links to a title on reddit. And there's the image posts like from r/funny where (despite me thinking they're dumb as hell) it is content that is forum neutral. So an outright no repost bots rule isn't any more ideal than them having no restrictions at all.

Like, best of legal advice, as an example. Useless bot because all it does is link back to legal advice posts without any of the comments from BOLA these made the sub entertaining. Stuff like that can go and nobody is missing out. But, stuff like r/art, the value is in the posts, so blanket banning that is a loss.

This needs manual curation like r/goodlongposts used to have until reddit pissed off the human that was doing the curation. Curation works for aggregation and reposts.

Agreed. I've seen some interesting posts, but I usually won't comment because it's just going to get spammed out by the next bot post.

This is why I stopped development of BotIt, if people don't want it then I won't continue making it

Agree, we should start banning repost bots.

I understand this perspective, but it is very biased and might just not be true for every case.
E.g. imagine someone wanting to migrate their community to Lemmy, but there are very few people following. Even if they post there, most people might stay in the origin community because there is just so much more content and they can engage with many other people. This is a vicious cycle, because no-one is there, no-one will go there.
Now, bring a repost bot in the game: Suddenly the alternative becomes viable, because the content is also available there. People are much easier able to switch because the difference is minimal. After a while, the original content increases and the necessarity for the repost bot decreases until it can be turned off. Much easier to get people away from Reddit and build a community.

Of course, this is also a specific example. And if there are existing communities with people that suddenly get spammed, that's a problem. But my point is, it's just not black and white, there can be different situations in which something can make sense or not.

Therefore I'd be clearly against blocking something like that sidewide because it can be helpful for single communities. Its totally reasonable for a community mod to block them if they personally conceive the bot to be spam for them, but yeah, I wouldn't agree with the statement that they need to be spam in general.