Recently there have started to be a few accounts that seem to be used by a person for writing comments while also being used by scripts to automatically repost content from Reddit and possibly elsewhere. This doesn't cleanly fit into our existing tools for classifying accounts and posts - a conventional bot might post RSS articles or other automated content, and users can choose to filter based on that bot setting. These new types of accounts are different from that because they're partly human and partly automated.
This causes a few problems:
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there are cases where the reposted content is written in the first person. Like for example, a Reddit post might say here's a photo of my cat, but when that post is automatically reposted into the Threadiverse by a reposter script, it can appear to us that the PyFed account owner is claiming the cat as their own. Yet that's obviously not the case, which gives an inauthentic feel to the environment.
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sometimes some of the material being reposted is content that violates the rules and norms of Threadiverse. And so we see a lot of strange culture war stuff and racist content coming through sometimes.
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a lot of people left reddit to get away from all the astroturfing and bots and LLMs running amok so letting that happen here too will just drive those people away.
Despite this, their content is often quite popular and many people upvote it and comment on it. Many people seem totally ok with it.
Before I change anything, it'd be really good to understand what the community wants to happen in response to this. I'm considering several possible approaches, including doing nothing, or introducing a new automated / reposted indicator for accounts (with a feed filter, separate from the bot indicator and filter), or continuing to apply the existing bot label onto those accounts, or restricting those kind of accounts completely. But I'm not going to propose a particular outcome yet. I'd like to hear what, if any, problems people are experiencing from these accounts and what information or controls would be useful.
This behavior mostly doesn't bother me personally, but I do see folks being irritated when they realize the person they want to talk to isn't the poster receiving the notifications. The best solution is what we have for bluesky via brid.gy -- a relay that syncs posts and comments bidirectionally across Reddit and PieFed, but I suspect Reddit would charge you quite a lot of money to operate that, and a lot of instances would end up defederating from the relay anyway because they don't want their posts and comments to end up synced to corporate social media.
Maybe instead we could add the equivalent of a referrer field, call it "origin" or something? If the user is shoveling content from reddit, they can set it to reddit.com; if it's coming from instagram, they can set it to instagram.com. Possibly even the url of the originating thread? Idk. But then you can visually distinguish things that are um... manually federated? from those that are organically posted in the UI.
Remember this scripted activity & content is coming from Lemmy so there is nothing we can do on the origin side of it. Also the people operating these accounts are not keen on voluntarily labelling themselves as reposters - they want to be seen as normal accounts.
So whatever changes we make can not rely on changes or cooperation from the script operators.
I think PieFed should only provide labeling and tooling for mixed accounts that originate from PieFed instances. I think admins of individual instances can decide whether they think these are bots that are improperly identifying themselves or not at the instance level, and that the tools that exist for admins to act on instances that don't properly identify bots are sufficient.
Would be a waste. Reddit would probably ban it hastily. And personally I don't want my comments on Reddit.
Brid.gy works by being opt-in — you have to follow the bridge for your posts to be synced — so that’s how they get around the “personally I don’t want my comments bridged” problem. I definitely agree that Reddit would probably ban it, and if they didn’t, the amount of money they would charge would be much better invested in other fedi projects.