This has been brewing for some time and the original plan was to only hide them from the "All" feed so that they would not pollute our member curated federated feed, but the feature to do so is sadly very inaccessible in Lemmy (hidden as a admin only API command that isn't exposed in the UI, making it a real hassle to use).
But these days these bot spam instances started to take up a lot of space on the federated feed, so I feel like full defederation is warranted now.
The bot spam instances identified so far are:
Additionally there are some bot accounts that are solely reposting RSS feeds and thus should also be banned:
This is a work in progress list. Feel free to suggest additional bot spam instances or accounts here in the comments. Thanks.
P.S.: If you run a individual RSS post bot for a community you moderate here on SLRPNK and it isn't spamming the federated feed with an excessive amount of posts, then there is no need to remove it.
Edit: the above instances are now defederated and the bot banned.
How does lemmy work with federation? Can you get filtered federation (e.g. if you ban a bot user, do their posts still federate)? I feel like this is a very harsh "baby out with the bathwater" kind of solution, but if there's no middle road, then I trust your judgement that defederation is preferable, at least short-term.
Actually, do any of the other fediverse platforms allow things like this? I think I heard you were looking into moving to piefed for instance?
Or can custom code run on import to filter at that step?
If I can "donate" some programming skills I'd love to help out. I'm mostly working with python these days but I've done elixir and c++ so I'll be able to wrap my head around most things with a bit of effort. It'll mostly be finding the time I guess. Otherwise I'll gladly backseat drive from the comments like this ๐
The point with defederation would be really that these instances have no real users and only consist of bot communities, so banning the bots from these instances individually would make little sense.
In general I think if you just want to use a RSS feed reader or alternative frontend for Reddit, then you should do so and not abuse Lemmy for this purpose, especially since it degrades the experience for other people on the same instance.
But I like having my rss feed reader and lemmy in one place! No I see your point and I agree, fair enough.
You can just subscribe to Lemmy in your RSS reader. Then you'll still have it in one place: your RSS reader. :)