Hi, I'm the author of @nitrofuel, a semi-automated tech news bridge to different Lemmy's communities and instances. This is not a standard bot, beacuse all links have to be review by the mantainer (at the moment, me) before the bot can post it on all communities (about 14 are registred in the main dataset); i know this is kinda spammy, but the idea is to still keep a medium content-quality threshold. The bot user just got banned, after less than an hour of running?
Is it possible to be unbaned? Is there a limit of posts/communities? Is there an higher content-quality threshold? I can change how the system works, but I wanted to ask for a possibility to be unbanned / recreate the account with infranging ToS, in order to build a better platform.
(P.S. The Nitrofuel bridge is also designed to slow the content output if the user partecipation goes up, in order to slowly fade away when a lot of other user-generated original high-quality content is posted; the final objective is to have the account officialiy deleted when the interested communities are fully-grown and there's a sufficent amount of high-quality original content)
I hate to say this but "let the market decide" on which communities thrive or fail. There is no pointin proping up empty communities with astroturfed bot spam. If people use a community it will survive otherwise it will die. All this repost spam only serves to further fragment the overall community into small cells of cloned content while limiting the discussion through this fragmentation.
I just discovered that there's a repost feature that should remove the spamming problem, brining a common comments section and avoiding repeated apparanceses on the same feed.
I can understand for small-to-empty communities on major instances, but the idea of the bot was to bring the human-moderated posts and links to communities on smaller instances also, in order to "boost" those instance: I think that only by helping smalling and even niche instances we can build a better Fediverse.
Bots can be useful, if there aren't spammy and the content is human-moderated in order to keep a certain quality thresholdd. (Just my opinon)
What does this do? Reposts across instances and communities? I think it is very spammy and leads to a lot of duplicates when subscribed to multiple communities on the same topic.
It does post the same link, verified and selected by an human admin, to multiple communities on different instances.
Do you think it's better to cut the number of communitites or is there a way to make one post and then link the other to the first post, like on Reddit, in order to make the client ignore the identical post altready seen (either in the original form or as a sublink) in another community?
You could cross post which would reduce spam but even then the point of federation is that a post on one instance will make its way to the other instances and share the same comments.
This is a much better version of what you want to do, isn’t spammy. What does your bot achieve that federation didn’t? Other than you controlling the content?
@[email protected] I don't know if this happened to you in this instance, but I'd recommend contacting the relevant admins/mods to discuss the matter with them.
More broadly, although I'd imagine you did before deploying the bot, I'd recommend checking each instance/community beforehand to ensure they're open to bot accounts being used, and if it's not clear, ask before going ahead and deploying the bot. I recognize your intent may be good, but it's always wise to research the space you're going into, if uncertain about something, ask for clarification, then act accordingly when operating with others' spaces.
With bots especially, this should help avoid getting them banned abruptly, as it at least shows there's a genuine person behind them. Without any advance contact, admins/mods are more likely to ban with the thinking that it may be a spambot or something.
Alright, where can I contact admins in order to discuss this matter?
Extra Note: I'm talking with a developer of the frontend in order to reach the crosspost feature from the API; this is beacuse for some reason the API isn't listed in the documentation, but there is a reference to the support of crossposts.