Popular sites tend to have them, ones you can customize to do whatever you want. Reddit’s and Discord’s are famous. People will commission them for money. Reddit’s haiku bot and their remind-me bot are famous even outside of Reddit. Discord’s most famous ones include the Pokemon-themed “Poketwo” bot and the now-defunct clyde bot.

The idea of the fediverse is that websites can join a league of nations type of organization that keeps the membership up and allow meta-interaction in return for cooperation, right? Wouldn’t the absence of bots come across as highly ironic given their utility with communicating across digital borders? Is making bots not possible, or is it just not favorable here (again, ironic)? I imagine certain bots could even establish communications with outside the fediverse, making a meta-fediverse.

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
    10·
    10 days ago

    One thing that is very slightly harder to do on the fediverse is a bot would only see the communities at least one of the instance’s users is subscribed to, so it’s not trivial to make one that sees everything out of the box. Easy enough to fix with a few API calls to recursively discover most instances though.

    And there are bots: there’s the Media Bias Fact Check bot, there’s the PipedVideo bot that posts piped/invidious links for any YouTube link. I have both of those blocked because I don’t care (and Tesseract has both built-in anyway).

    I think culturally stuff like remind me is too noisy/unnecessarily spammy, so if I were to implement such a thing I’d do it directly into the UI so you don’t have to (ab)use comments for that. The haiku bot I blocked a long time ago because it’s just kinda noisy, it’s fun for a while but eventually it gets annoying. As an admin I also think about resource usage, it’s not just wasting big VC funded companies money, it’s wasting people like me’s money too.

    The fediverse opens up a lot of possibilities that allows things to be done cleanly without bots and spam. As a user you’re free to use any UI/frontend you want and still access all the available features, unlike Reddit, well before they killed off third party apps completely.