I used code from a github repo to make a lemmy repost bot from a reddit sub.
I tested it out, it seemed OK. So I let it run over night.
When I got back I found out it had been posting the same thing over and over again every few minutes. The account was banned for spam. But in the meantime it was very annoying to people. Also, there are a bunch of posts that can’t be removed because it’s impossible to remove federated stuff.
Is there a responsible way to test this stuff?
I don’t want to make spam, be annoying, etc. I feel bad about the spam bot.
Technical problems aside, no one wants repost bots from Reddit. Nothing makes people unsubscribe faster from a sub than a ton of bot posts without comments.
Ya I planned for it to be in a separate community from the native fediverse. Idea was to allow people to sub to the reddit repost if they wanted.
It is lucky that I did that because otherwise this oopsie spambot thing might have got the native community in trouble, people unsub, reported, banned etc.
How is that any different from organic posts without comments, though?
And if you comment on a organic post, at least the original author is probably gonna read it. Engaging with a bot post is just wasted time typing something out that noone will ever read.
Ideally posts and comments are somewhat in a relationship. For a community with little traffic, posts will occur scarcely, and few subscribers will add and read comments in their time.
If the community has few subscribers but many posts, any commented posts will be scrolled down so much that engagements stagnates.
So yes, you are right. If a small community has a single human poster who posts all the time without commenters engagement, it’s the same problem.
But a bot almost guarantees that any community it posts runs into that situation. You can’t automate human engagement.
Yes. Host your own Lemmy instance. It’s not that hard and can be run locally with no federation.
There are communities specifically for testing. Maybe one of them would be willing to have you? Or make your own testing community?
It won’t fix the spam problem if stuff goes south though with things like repost bots. That’s a lot of excess traffic. OP definitely should host their own instance.
good call asking for a proper venue to test this, but how do you mean you can’t remove federated stuff? i was under the impression (from lemmy’s homepage) that one of the features is 100% complete deletion by replacing post/comment content with ‘removed by user’. is this not the case?
I think https://enterprise.lemmy.ml is specifically for testing. It’s not typically federated with other instances, so it won’t be a problem if your bot goes crazy again.
this page also mentions https://voyager.lemmy.ml/ and https://ds9.lemmy.ml/
voyager and ds9 are front ends for lemmy
Lemmy has an HTTP API for clients and frontends.
For others, see https://github.com/dbeley/awesome-lemmy
I don’t think they help anything here. But thanks :)
edit: I can’t tell what enterprise.lemmy.ml is for? anyone else?
These instances are specifically made for people testing code that interfaces with Lemmy. This includes front ends and bots.
You should not use any communities on real instances since people will see your testing on their local page.
