Discovering bot accounts
I've recently seen bot accounts being used in various discussions, like:
@remindme@mstdn.social@ChatGPT@lemmings.world@AutoTLDR@programming.dev@CommunityLinkFixer@lemmings.world
It seems like there should be a way to discover these bots without having to first see them in use, but the Lemmy User search doesn't offer an option to return bot accounts and (obviously) doesn't provide useful results when searching "bot".
Is there some way to discover them that I'm missing? Maybe using the Lemmy API? Failing some sort of automated curation, does a "Use(ful/less) Bots" community where bot authors may announce their bot exist?
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there's also the bot that copies everything over from Reddit and seeing it on my all feed is the bane of my existence
It's blockable fortunately - maybe not via whatever app your using, but if you log into your instance website with a browser, you can choose to block the bot (at) lemmit (dot) online
I did block it but damn it was annoying before i figured out how to do that
Unfortunately all subreddit mirror requests to that bot are auto-approved, and there is no subreddit subscriber limit. That means that very large subreddits with already-active Lemmy communities get mirrored. That causes unnecessary duplication and a lot of noise due to frequent posts to the subreddits.
That said, I actually subscribe to a few of that bot's communities for tiny, niche subreddits (like with 5k Reddit subscribers) that I followed. I use it because it will take time for Lemmy to reach adoption capable of sustaining those very specialized communities. It's useful for links (less so for discussions.)
you can block the account! ;)