Broadcast Only Accounts and Bots

Hi all,

The Community Working Group has recently had several reports from users of social.coop accounts that do not violate our Code of Conduct in any way, but which the users consider spammy because they do not interact with other users. Broadly these fall into two categories:

1. bots and bridges (ie. users who mirror their Twitter but do not engage on social.coop)

2. users posting marketing material or links (eg. new blog posts, business updates, monthly meetup links, etc.)

There has been some discussion of whether Twitter mirrors and the like should be allowed on social.coop, but I am not aware of any discussion of option 2. An example of this kind of user might be a co-op who posts links to their monthly meetup each month but does not read the timeline or engage with other users content except maybe to answer questions posed to them about the meetup. They do not directly reach out to other without their consent to advertise (this would definitely be spam and is likely against our CoC), but this is still seen as spammy by some users who see it in the local timeline and do not like the marketing-speak these accounts engage in. I apologize for not providing an example, but I don't want to call out the existing accounts that have been reported.

Some points to think about whether these accounts should be allowed in our community:

• Is there any distinction between bot/mirror/gateway accounts and actual users who do not engage and should they be moderated differently?

• Is there a distinction between users who mostly post free services or events vs. paid services or events?

• Is there distinction between a organization account that acts this way vs. an individual users account (ie. if a business hosts a lecture series and they post about it every week vs. if an individual user who just likes that lecture series or helps organize it posts about it every week)?

• Is there harm to the community caused by allowing these accounts?

• Is there a benefit to the community caused by allowing these accounts?

• Anything else I've missed?

Thanks in advance for your feedback and discussion! I apologize for the long but also somewhat vague post. If it needs any clarification please let me know!

EDIT: to clarify, this is for accounts that exclusively (or almost exclusively) post marketing materials and do not otherwise engage with the community, not any account that has ever advertised an interesting co-op project or the like :)