I was thinking of running an instance which houses just bots. In theory, that’d make it easy to have an easy to remember URL and usernames, like !bgg@bot.pls or something. If I can get a URL that makes sense I might consider something like this. It’d keep it small enough to call, and make sure they’re always 100% intentional.
This is mainly because I don’t want to be a source of annoyance for anyone, and I’ve seen too many people annoyed at the “natural response” bots that pop in all the time on reddit.
If they’re on their own instance, a whole instance can block that instance if they don’t want bots, or block specific bots if they prefer.
Or even better - what if they need to request specific bots? That is: the bot needs human consent to act on first place. That means that bots will be only used if they’re clearly useful for the instance, community or the user, not just a “yeah this bot is annoying and adding noise but why bother?”
I need to do some experiments to find out what happens if a bot is tagged in a community they’re not subbed to. It may be that this is exactly what I can do - it’d be a request by a user, then the mod can ban it if they want. I don’t know whether I can do something where only a mod can invite, I’ll have to see if there’s anything that might help there
mastodon already has botsin.space, depending on how well lemmy & masto interoperate (in theory they’ll be fine because AP, but these kinda things tend to mess up in practice. lemmy still doesn’t do authorized fetch afaik) hosting bots there & calling them from lemmy should work.
I was thinking of running an instance which houses just bots. In theory, that’d make it easy to have an easy to remember URL and usernames, like !bgg@bot.pls or something. If I can get a URL that makes sense I might consider something like this. It’d keep it small enough to call, and make sure they’re always 100% intentional.
This is mainly because I don’t want to be a source of annoyance for anyone, and I’ve seen too many people annoyed at the “natural response” bots that pop in all the time on reddit.
If they’re on their own instance, a whole instance can block that instance if they don’t want bots, or block specific bots if they prefer.
Or even better - what if they need to request specific bots? That is: the bot needs human consent to act on first place. That means that bots will be only used if they’re clearly useful for the instance, community or the user, not just a “yeah this bot is annoying and adding noise but why bother?”
I need to do some experiments to find out what happens if a bot is tagged in a community they’re not subbed to. It may be that this is exactly what I can do - it’d be a request by a user, then the mod can ban it if they want. I don’t know whether I can do something where only a mod can invite, I’ll have to see if there’s anything that might help there
mastodon already has botsin.space, depending on how well lemmy & masto interoperate (in theory they’ll be fine because AP, but these kinda things tend to mess up in practice. lemmy still doesn’t do authorized fetch afaik) hosting bots there & calling them from lemmy should work.
That’s actually a really bright idea. Makes bots easier to identify, and easier to avoid if preferred.