Policy on bot accounts

Discussion sounds good. Bot accounts that simply repost media from somewhere else are the ones I really want to never see, but if there were a Mastodon feature to filter out all bots that would be a better solution than banning bots IMO. I recognize that some people like that stuff. To me it's all noise getting in the way of the humans I want to see.

I think we need to be careful about definitions here.

I have no objection to gateways that bring content from elsewhere into Mastodon. Frankly, I follow a bunch of those: from people who happen to use Bluesky instead of Mastodon, or reposting photos from NASA, or stuff like that. That's a service, and I think it's generally a plus -- something that some of us quite consciously opt into. I'm hard-against us preventing folks from following those: that would make Mastodon much less interesting and useful to me. (Hell, that would ban Popehat, who IMO is more useful than any other account I know.)

OTOH, true 'bots -- automated accounts that are pretending to be human -- are a more interesting and current problem. In airy theory I'm not firmly against them, but in practice they're likely to be dangerous.

Honestly, though, I care less about how the content is being created than what the account is doing. Impersonation of another real person, IMO, is clearly out of bounds. An account that is focused on manipulation, falsehood, or suchlike is problematic, regardless of whether it's coming from a person or a machine. An account that is posting overwhelming amounts of traffic is unquestionably a problem.

And so on. It's a bit facile to say "No bots" -- I think it's over-simplistic, but so long as we define "bot" properly I probably don't care much. But ultimately, it's not simple to detect what's a 'bot and what's a real person, so IMO it's probably a better idea in the long run to focus on what constitutes bad behavior.

@Justin du Coeur I like the idea of focusing on bad behavior, totally agree

I think tweaking our signup form to let people who are signing up for an automated or semi-automated account declare that could be useful though, or requiring people who are running automated accounts to say so in the description of the account.