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"Would be"? There are already way too many bots on Mastodon, many of them do unpaid advertising for commercial news outlets (reposting their RSS feeds). I guess
by pferde 7y ago
"Would be"? There are already way too many bots on Mastodon, many of them do unpaid advertising for commercial news outlets (reposting their RSS feeds). I guess people who run them think they're doing "fediverse" a favour, but they're only getting more eyeballs and ad views for those outlets.
The solution is liberal and frequent use of blocking, but it's a solution that does not scale well.
- nightpool 7y agoactually, it's a solution that scales pretty well. I help run an medium sized mastodon instance, and I managed to silence every spammy news aggregator with a couple hours of effort, It only takes a few seconds to respond to reports of new ones, and now the couple hundred people who use my server don't need to worry about RSS spam at all. Small communities allow for more effecient moderation.
- pferde 7y agoSorry for being unclear - I was referring to blocking on user level, where everyone can decide for themselves what they consider spam, instead of leaving it "for the admin".
- toohotatopic 7y agoOn user level, people could cooperate and make lists of spam accounts. There could be various lists with different values that determine who belongs on the list. People could subscribe to the lists that suit them and add all users on those lists to their block list.
- BeetleB 7y agoI run some RSS bots on Diaspora. Lots of people feel I'm providing value. They want to get this content in their feed, so they subscribe.
- progval 7y agoThe problem on the Fediverse is when these bots post in "public" instead of "unlisted", so everyone gets the posts in the public timeline, which gets overrun by bots.
- pferde 7y agoYes, that is exactly my problem with such bots. They turn RSS - a thing which you have to go out of your way to opt in to - to something which you have to go out of your way to opt out of.
- BeetleB 7y agoTo be frank, most of the non-bot content on public tends to be low quality. I didn't think many people follow "public".
- pferde 7y agoI agree on the low quality of the global public channel (both Diaspora and Mastodon have one), but if you pick a good server, the local public channel tends to be quite useful for discovering new and interesting stuff - or people. Once you block all the noisy bots, that is...