There are bots. You can even mark your user account as a bot. There are bots that copy content to Lemmy. There are bots that post alternatives to sites. There are bots that listen to key words and post inside jokes.

There are a handful of repost bots and automod bots around. If there is no haiku bot or remind-me bot it’s only because nobody has taken the time to write and host them.

Hi, I run a bot for the turkey community for local news on my account. The API is more open than ever for making bots, though bots are pretty much made based on what people want with them.

One thing that is very slightly harder to do on the fediverse is a bot would only see the communities at least one of the instance’s users is subscribed to, so it’s not trivial to make one that sees everything out of the box. Easy enough to fix with a few API calls to recursively discover most instances though.

And there are bots: there’s the Media Bias Fact Check bot, there’s the PipedVideo bot that posts piped/invidious links for any YouTube link. I have both of those blocked because I don’t care (and Tesseract has both built-in anyway).

I think culturally stuff like remind me is too noisy/unnecessarily spammy, so if I were to implement such a thing I’d do it directly into the UI so you don’t have to (ab)use comments for that. The haiku bot I blocked a long time ago because it’s just kinda noisy, it’s fun for a while but eventually it gets annoying. As an admin I also think about resource usage, it’s not just wasting big VC funded companies money, it’s wasting people like me’s money too.

The fediverse opens up a lot of possibilities that allows things to be done cleanly without bots and spam. As a user you’re free to use any UI/frontend you want and still access all the available features, unlike Reddit, well before they killed off third party apps completely.

As other people have said, there are definitely bots on the fediverse

In fact, the coolest thing about lemmy for me is that there’s a checkbox in settings to disable viewing any bot users

Although as I understand, users have to self-identify as a bot, so the actually harmful bots probably don’t do that. But I can dream

We have bots here. Even your idea of pulling in external content. Thats what lemmit.online and rss.ponder.cat are about.

I think all of this is a bit toned down, though. Some people (including me) specifically like the Fediverse for NOT being a 1:1 Reddit or Discord clone. We don’t need to keep the users addicted to our platform in order to display more ads to them. Hence we left out a lot of the gamification and small endorphine kicks that are meant to keep people hooked. I personally like it that way. And I heard some other people, too.

Feel free to request some features. If you have a specific idea in mind that aids communication, it might get implemented, or already be somewhere out there. I just don’t think we need to add more bots just for the sake of it.

There is loads of bots, you could make a bot yourself.

Beep Boop

🤖 I. Am. Not. A. Ro-bot. Beep. 🤖