cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4645104

Hey all,

Over the past week or so, I’ve been fighting with the bots running on Lemmy.world. Their CloudFlare protections often threw up errors which caused the bots to choke and die during games. I have been trying to figure out how to work around these issues, though the errors weren’t particularly clear in pointing me toward what needed to be corrected.

This morning, I received a DM from a user (not an admin) letting me know that the bot account @[email protected] had been banned for spamming the mod log. To be clear: there was definitely a bug in the bot - one I had already fixed but hadn’t pulled to the machine running the live bot. The bot got stuck trying to unsticky a post about every 30 seconds. Even though the issue was more annoying than damaging, banning the bot was the right call in this situation.

That being said, despite their policy requiring bots have contact info for their maintainers, no one at Lemmy.world has contacted me about this. I’m not really surprised about this - the lemmy.world admins are constantly fighting DDOS attacks, and dealing with rogue bots isn’t high on their priority list.

Another concern is that Lemmy.world is having ongoing federation issues with some instances, including Fanaticus.social, that has been going on for weeks. These instances have not been defederated, however some combination of Lemmy bugs and CloudFlare protection has effectively defederated them. I understand that they are working to address this, but again - this is not lemmy.world’s priority right now. They are working with the admin of fanaticus.social, but despite promises that they will fix it, things are still not resolved.

So, all of this has led me to the decision to stop running bots on Lemmy.world. This isn’t intended to be some kind of retaliation or protest, it just doesn’t make sense to continue. Lemmy.world has enough of its own problems to deal with, and I don’t want to contribute to their headaches. I personally am frustrated with their lack of availability, so I’m moving my primary login to lemma.ee so I can reliably access communities that don’t live on lemmy.world.

I am going to continue to run the Philly bots for Fanaticus.social. For those not familiar with it, it is a smaller instance focused on sports communities. The admin is the lead on the Lemmy port of Redball and I’ve been working with him since the start of this effort. Since it isn’t heavily loaded, that instance can survive bot hiccups here and there, and the admin can reach me quickly if there is a serious problem.

I’m open to running some bots on other instances, though I’m going to hold off on running the NFL bot on anything other than fanaticus until we’re confident that it is stable. I’ll also be avoiding running bots on “big” instances. I don’t think hosting communities on instances with a larger number of users is a good idea, particularly if that instance is already having performance or security issues. I’ll briefly state that I think that the fediverse should have large instances for users, small instances for communities. Without digging into that tangent, if you are interested in discussing it further, I’ve started putting some detailed thoughts about it together here.

Redball is open source, so anyone is free to run it on whatever instance they choose. I’ll encourage any questions or discussions about Redball on Lemmy be posted here in [email protected].

Thanks for understanding. And go Birds/Phils!

C