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Personally - I think any bot that could be straight Lemmy functionality shouldn't exist but that said, I think good ground rules would be :

• Bots should be clearly prompted by a command
• Bots should not act in a community without mods from that community being contacted first
• Bots should minimize the space they take with their messages (Example: Info on how to contact its creator should be in the bot bio rather than in every message)
• Bots should say who made/hosts it

Please keep the bots to a minimum.

Approved bots that the admins manually review the use cases for is absolutely fine.

I just don't want things to revert back to reddit days where I'm constantly BLOCKING new novelty bots that are absolutely freaking useless and add nothing to a conversation.

Also; PLEASE; implement the following ideas into a(n) agreement/covenant for bot operators; I quote this directly from the Tao of IRC:

The master Nap then said: "Any automata should not speak unless spoken to. Any automata shall only whisper when spoken to."

If they're informative and/or helpful, I don't mind bots. If they're those stupid pointless novelty bots that were plaguing Reddit, they can go away.

98% of bots are crap. The problem is that people have different opinions as to which 98% of them is the crap portion.

Absolutely any bot needs to self-identify.

Comment bots are mostly fine so long as they are clearly labelled, don't take up unnecessary amounts of space, have clear purpose and add value to an article or discussion. So stuff like TLDR, Piped, Wiki bots are fine. Stuff like GROND, GPT (even though it's cool we have a Masto feature that does that), Anakin, Musk bots aren't useful here imo.

Post bots, I'm kind of on the side of I'd rather not see them, I like talking about articles with the user who posted it. I won't be too upset if they end up allowed, though. A whitelist, or a strictly enforced guideline would be acceptable for me.

Is anyone checking the AI "summariser" bot for accuracy? I'd rather not get misleading ideas in my head from a poor summary.

I dislike content that has been auto-posted by bots. I treat it like spam instead of genuine content.

I would love to see a "bot" flag and a parameter on your profile to not show any "bot" content.

I guess people who make bots are scared that the Lemmy platforms would eventually stop seeing activity because of a lack of content. But I think that if there were little to no activity, perhaps people would be posting more. I doubt that flooding the platform with auto-generated content or auto-forwarded content actually helps with encouraging people to stay.

I like summary bots, summoned bots that serve a purpose, and meme bots if they stay in specific communities where they are expected to be. All bots should self identify.

I could be mistaken but doesn't Lemmy just have a setting for the user to not see bot posts?

I also figure users can block specific bots if they don't like them.

I think bots can have a place, but I prefer ones that have to be intentionally invoked. I'm thinking of ones like MTGCardFetcher on the Magic the Gathering subreddit, which would post links to the card on Scryfall if you formatted the card name in double brackets in your comment.

Honestly, as a programmer, I'd like the freedom to share bots that can benefit the community. Although, I do think that there should be measures in place to ensure bots don't degrade the quality of the community.

Honestly the only bot I've actually found myself missing is the metric/imperial conversion one, makes talking with Americans a lot easier!

While I understand the use cases of bots that provide some sort of utility or post helpful information, I lean towards having no bots. Reddit was festering with bots of all stripes - mostly memes - and it was kind of unbearable.
I personally long for a community that features strictly human-to-human conversation and interaction.
I'm aware that this opinion will likely be in the minority, given how tech-centric the fediverse in general is, but that's my thought on the matter.

My opinion is that bots should be classed by how they operate.

Summoned bots should be mostly free of restriction. If it needs someone to explicitly summon it, then the onus is on them to not needlessly summon bots. Requiring explicit

Keyword/auto-summon bots should at a minimum be required to implement easy user/community/instance opt-out. I think the most viable would be allowing auto-summon only when explicitly allowed by the user, community, or instance, but allow them to reply to manual summons without restrictions.

So how it would work is if someone had a bot that would, for example, post Nitter links in response to Twitter links, it would be allowed to:

• Respond to @[email protected]
• Respond on posts by someone who's indicated they want the bot to auto-reply to their posts
• Respond to posts on a community that allows the bot to do so

One of the things I like about Beehaw is the lack of bot posts in every thread. Personally I think all bots should be banned because it eliminates some unwanted spam, but a good compromise for me is that bots be explicitly labeled, and can only respond to a trigger command. Nothing that auto posts.

Bots can be extremely useful and the flexibility of where and how bots could work was one of the things that made Reddit popular. Before, well, y'know.

Bespoke bots can also allow particular communities to develop local features or functionality. I assume Lemmy's mod tools are fair bare bones right now too, so I suspect someone, somewhere is probably working on an automod toolkit.

Bots should be allowed, but must be flagged. I don't know if it's a default lemmy option, but the app I use has a toggle to hide bot accounts if you don't want to see them.

That said, I would very much prefer if bots were restricted to just making comments rather than posts. Certain communities have bots that automatically post article links and they completely blanket feeds sorted by new until you block the account.

Bots like gramma and spelling bots should just gtfo. Every bot should be a genuine postitive improvement to a community or otherwise they shouldn't exist.

I can see value in a summarization bot or an auto moderator so long as allowing some didn't turn into a burden on the admin team on which ones to allow.

I think their value can easily be outweighed if there are too many bots providing no value.

I say no to bots. I see the utility in some of them, but beehaw is only one instance, and I'd love to keep it an instance that I know is full of actual people. Makes me want to engage in conversation much more. Besides, if you want a bot filled experience you can engage in one of the instances that allow bots. If bots are allowed, I want them to be very clearly labeled. I want to know in one glance if I'm speaking to a bot.

If we accept bots, I prefer those that can be summoned by the user, as it happens on Discord. If we accept bots either summoned or not by the user, they must be identified as such on their profiles.

But in no way I'll accept bots that pretend to be a human user or that can interact in the same way a human user can, neither commenting nor posting nor voting.

My thoughts on this is pretty much voiced by some of the others.

For instance, there was a tool that could be used to repost things from a reddit user page. I've warned (and the dev have added the warning to the repo itself) that the tool can cause one to be banned. Now the only way I can see that working without inciting a ban is if the tool was triggered by a command, and only took one link at a time. Assuming the mods already gave permission. Something like the wiki bot I've seen over on reddit that posted the overview of a wiki link. However, I would rather be able to trigger it with a !wiki <url> or something to that effect.

The only exception I would take with this is with an automod that reminds users to include specific things in their posts...but I'm also meh about this. If people post without reading the sidebar, they're probably not going to bother coming back and reading a comment. This issue would be better solved through other means (a reminder of the community rules in the New Post page, after choosing a community).

The bots 100% need to have the bot tag on. No bots impersonating as people, please.

That's my 2¢ for now.

I'm glad ya'll have made it to where I can easily block them all in the settings. I guess some people like them tho; so that's a happy medium.

I don't think I have a strong opinion toward bots. They could get gimmicky and unnecessary, but I never felt like they detracted from my experience to a noteworthy degree. I don't think I ever disliked bots too much on Reddit? But then again, I rarely liked or wanted bots, either. I have a loose leaning toward letting people reasonably experiment with how they interact with a platform online, but "bots" as in the kind of stuff I remember from Reddit seem like a relatively weak expression of that. If I had to put an opinion down, I'd say that I'm in favor of their continued presence with the caveat of some guidelines and defined best-practices. Otherwise, if I wake up one day to learn that bots are banned on Beehaw, admittedly I wouldn't be all that bummed about it.

th3raid0r and Lionir seem to get pretty well at the kind of recommendations I'd like to see. Bots ideally should provide a meaningful contribution to communities. Bots should be clearly labelled and identifiable as such. Bot creators should have consent from the community's moderators to have a bot interact within the community. The Cardinal Be^e^ Nice applies here, perhaps to a greater degree: bots shouldn't be used to fake engagement, impersonate people, commit technical attacks on the community, etc.

the_itsb also reminded me of another aspect: we may want to consider how active and populated a community is. Bots take up the attention and visual space of everyone else browsing a community and its discussions. It strikes me as a worst-case scenario, but I could imagine it's possible for a bot overabundance to choke out legitimate conversation. That's enough for me to start thinking twice about whether or not I have a loose stance on this.

I'm of the opinion that bots are okay if:

1. They provide value to the community - A news-bot seems to be well received at tucson.social and it helps people get all their Tucson updates in one place without having to share it themselves.

2. They assist with moderation. Auto responding to new posts that reminds thread participants of the rules could be one use-case.

3. They enhance the dialogue of the thread or provide useful and important corrections. Perhaps there's a bot that looks up species names and provides useful links in a reply of a zoological based post? I say that's great and what we want!

As for ChatGPT bots:

1. All bots must disclose they are a bot.
2. All bots must not fake engagement. As in, it's okay to be other bots because of their relatively strict use-cases and minimal ability to hallucinate and no ability to respond to further queries. ChatGPT makes it appear as if it's a person at times and can be subtly wrong - we have people that do that just fine.
3. ChatGPT content should go into their own relevant subs. A MachineLearning community might be good at first, but perhaps eventually a dedicated LLM/ChatGPT Writes type community would eventually be needed for peoples more creative impulses. It's not exactly relevant for someplace like tucson.social, but might be for a place like BeeHaw.

I'm sure someone's got some bots on Lemmy that are actually decent, but I haven't seen them yet. The bots I've seen have just been spamming copies of reddit posts or other articles. I block them, and I usually block the communities they spam.

This seems wasteful since I'd want to just include a summary in my posts, maybe if admins/moderators used bots to make regularly occurring posts or something but even then, most of the time the post content is written by a human.

With that in mind, people who wish to create bots can label their accounts as bots and identify themselves through the user agent when not using an account at all.

The bots don't necessarily have to post/comment, getting rid of all bots doesn't exactly seem productive.

I don't want bots on Beehaw. Either unknown ChatGPT generated comments or bots that just listen to keywords and hey heres a Wikipedia link type. I want discussion from real, good, people with opinions. Not a bot with useless commentary I could just Google(Kagi) instead. Rules around this type of bot is okay, this isnt gets into rules lawyering and favoritism. My vote is no to bots.

I have no issue at all with utility bots (AutoMod-style assistants, summarizers, unit conversion aids, RemindMe!, etc.) and honestly, novelty comment bots don't bother me much either as long as they're not drowning out actual conversation. I'm less tolerant of bots posting links and content, though.

I like the bot that provides a piped link for YouTube.

Bots that can be summoned (e.g. !savevideo, or whatever the command format would be) could be useful. Otherwise, bots can sod off.