OK, I think we have a winner. New rule incoming.
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2026
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100% percent. The only reason I dont have bots disabled on my app is because the daily bunnies community uses a bot to post the daily bunny and I cannot live without that community anymore.
Pray tell, how might a person find this community, o erudite one?
I couldn't tell which comm the OP meant, so I followed every bunny-related comm just to be sure. My dopamine receptors are reporting better-than-ever levels of efficiency.
It would be nice if there was a bot whitelist and blacklist feature
No more clankers pls.
Easy. The answer is yes. Now, moving on.
I just think that is a bad idea because ActivityPub is a peering protocol. That means just a lot of traffic. If we have bots posting then that is just a lot of wasted storage space and network bandwidth to do not a whole lot. Moderation bots is a HARD maybe. Topic/comment (1 way) bridges would be cool from reddit and other sources but I doubt that would work out too well since it would probably get blocked by reddit somehow.
Overall, no bots plz
My instance doesn't have downvotes, but I certainly don't see a need for them on this poll either
The fucked up part is that even if you ban bots, the people running them won't respect the ban and will take it as a challenge, because that's always how these types of people work.
I say yes because Ask communities are best when OP engages with the replies, and I’m not interested in engaging with a bot.
Absolutely. I come here to interact with humans and their opinions. I don't care what some computer program thinks about ANYTHING. IF AI Agents/ Bots become accepted on Lemmy, I'm outta here.
Exactly. This kills the Lemmy.
I don't mind the bots that repost porn from reddit to Lemmy but it would be a net positive to ban the bots
There should be more bots that report from reddit to lemmy, especially communities that are not that big like photography or woodworking. It would definitely help having more content even if it's not OG.
What would be the function of bots posting to Ask Lemmy?
Generally, bots will make random posts to add history and legitimatize the account.
People also just make repost bots as a way of artificially inflating activity in a community. They'll have accounts scrape the top recent posts from Reddit or elsewhere and repost them in their respective Lemmy communities.
Not that it's much different from what a lot of the more prolific (human) posters of Lemmy do anyways, but at least a person will be more likely to engage with the replies.
Yes, please.
So sick of weird bot questions and replies on here.
I think if I am presented with an are you a robot captcha check box every 10 refreshes on lemmy.world for being on a VPN, that is the least we can do for bots.
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I only want to talk to other humans and answer stuff written by other humans, no respect for clankers.
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Of course they should be banned. Question is how?
Captchas don't stop all bots anymore. Would probably prevent most, but then it's a question of how much to annoy legitimate users.
It's not like I'm willing to solve one each time I post (human here, BTW). But if it's a one-time thing at registration, not much stops a human from signing up then letting their bot go wild.
And that's before even thinking about the federation problem. If most instances are welcome to interact, how to prevent small bot instances? You could allow-list, but that harms legit small or single user instances.
Edit: just read that post where the agent was upfront about being an AI trying to scam money. And I'd say that shouldn't be allowed. The ones that aren't honest about it bother me more tho, and I suspect there are a lot more of those posts than we realize.
Captchas stop ME more than it does bots.
I'll try twice then move on.
Most anti-ai tech isn't captcha anymore. Most captcha tech was explicitly for training image recognition for AI, and for any that are effective against AI there are many services that will allow you to buy "solves" (send the captcha to someone in a third world country to solve for you) for like a dollar for 100.
Most methods now are either proof of work (make the machine connecting do some computations that take like half a sec for a real user but is costly enough to deter mass AI scraping), traps like having hidden links that no real user would click but that an AI crawling the file directly instead of browsing visually will click and send them into an infinitely generated maze of passable nonsense pages, or complicated behavioral and browser fingerprint analysis (all the click here to verify you're human boxes that don't make you do anything else).
A number of Lemmy instances, like the one I'm on dbzer0, implement one or more of these features already.
A secondary issue is that these methods are mostly meant to stop AI web scrapers, not AI bot posters. Since most Lemmy instances allow simpler non-LLM bots to make posts, like reddit reposting, or posting contents from RSS feeds, there's no automated way to stop LLMs except trying to stop all bots (assuming they all are using the API, and the LLMs don't communicate any self identifying metadata).
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Selfcare and worldcare wrapped into one.
Yes
Agree, I lived on askreddit for so long that I noticed the regularity of types of posts. Towards the end of the open API days it was quite obvious that the forum was more machine than man, all twisted and evil.
IMO yes. What the hell is the point answering questions posed by a bot?
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Yes.
I'm here to engage with humans. Not to feed some cuntstain CEO's latest training model.
"Should bot posts be banned-" Yes.
Link to the bot post?
Also, i upvoted. Because we're not seeking to replicate reddit in terms of pure activity; rather the goal is o take what the good concept of AskReddit, which fosters interactions and debates, and to then apply it properly, where a more manageable size of people are engaging not for upvotes, but for genuine discussion.
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