I’ve recently seen bot accounts being used in various discussions, like:
@remindme@mstdn.social@ChatGPT@lemmings.world@AutoTLDR@programming.dev@CommunityLinkFixer@lemmings.world
It seems like there should be a way to discover these bots without having to first see them in use, but the Lemmy User search doesn’t offer an option to return bot accounts and (obviously) doesn’t provide useful results when searching “bot”.
Is there some way to discover them that I’m missing? Maybe using the Lemmy API? Failing some sort of automated curation, does a “Use(ful/less) Bots” community where bot authors may announce their bot exist?
What’s to stop someone from just not checking the ‘bot account’ option for their bot though?
The docs say:
So a bot account that doesn’t self-report would be a violation of policy and should be banned from the entire instance by the admin if discovered.
To be clear: I’m personally not against useful bots. But a “Bot accounts cannot post to this community” mod option would just allow the mods to choose for their community.