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Zamboniman

@Zamboniman@lemmy.ca

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Zamboniman,
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TIL the Technology Connections guy is on Lemmy via Mastadon.

And that’s awesome!

Zamboniman,
@Zamboniman@lemmy.ca avatar

WTF, I ain’t watching an hour long video on a stupid fridge! I’ll just watch the first few minutes and see what’s up…

One hour later…

Okay, that was really interesting. I really love this channel.

The crossposting bot is gonna take a vacation

Thanks to everyone that has posted or DMed about the bot doing the Reddit crossposting, and giving me your thoughts! Reviews have been mixed, which I expected, about whether or not the bot is useful or annoying or somewhere in between. It’s getting turned off for now and I’ll let the community grow organically....

What to follow Malazan with? Looking for palate cleanser before diving into next big thing.

So I’ve been in the Malazan marathon for a while. Currently early in book nine, but expect to be done book ten within a month. It’s fantastic (pun intended)! Going to need something to cleanse the palate after such a rich series – the speculative fiction equivalent of the pickled ginger served with sushi. Any suggestions?

Zamboniman,
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That’s that series by Steven Erikson I believe? I’ve come across that before but haven’t read it. Sounds like you recommend it!

Zamboniman,
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A very helpful write up on this, thanks! Yeah, I think the ‘waiting several pages to see what character we’re dealing with’ thing would be really annoying. But, it sounds like an interesting series despite this.

Zamboniman,
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Yup, came here to say that as well. it’s al bots. The active users graph is much more realistic.

And I’ve been seeing some…odd looking… comments recently from users at instances known for being mostly bots. Some of these comments really look AI generated, and have a suspicious number of upvotes.

Zamboniman,
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Are any of these accounts bots?

About 2.45 million of the 2.5 are, yes.

Zamboniman,
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So what are the Bots doing?

Many of them are doing nothing so far.

No doubt they are available for sale to some company or individual that wants to buy them wholesale and start spamming or astroturfing.

Who created them and why?

People wanting to sell them for $$ mostly. In some cases, people biding their time to use them for mass spam, social misdirection, opinion forming, etc.

I don’t understand the purpose of bots.

In social media, a common and concerning use of them is to use them wholesale (comments, posts, and votes) to try and sway mass opinion on some issue to something the person responsible for the bots wants.

Zamboniman, (edited )
@Zamboniman@lemmy.ca avatar

Sure, I’ll delete some of them. A few of them have various comments on them already, and several of them have a few upvotes, so I’ll leave those ones.

Zamboniman, (edited )
@Zamboniman@lemmy.ca avatar

Understood, and no worries. Yeah, it shouldn’t have been overwhelmed with posts like that. And, of course, as discussed the bot is only temporary in any case. That bug threw us for a loop for sure. Give the community a try again in a few days if you like.

Zamboniman, (edited )
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I just noticed we were at 0.18! Nice work @smorks! Now to take this thing for a spin and see how it handles on the curves!

Edit: I just looked at those Release Notes. That’s an impressive list of bug fixes and improvements! And also a very impressive list of new contributors helping develop this software. Kudos to all of them!

Zamboniman,
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They didn’t switch sides. They created a third side. A Mêlée à Trois.

Zamboniman,
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I haven't read any of Ben Bova's books for years. I'm glad you mentioned this one, I've been intending to read this. This might be the impetus I need to get started.

Zamboniman,
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Sounds right up my alley for sure.

Zamboniman,
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Both lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, and some other instances, were victims of a DDOS attack due to a bug in the new 0.18 Lemmy software

See this post for more info.

Zamboniman, (edited )
@Zamboniman@lemmy.ca avatar

Thanks for commenting! For much of the content you’ve seen in the past few hours, yeah, there was a glitch in the bot. That should be fixed shortly. Feel free to check things out again in a day or so and I think all should be good.

As for having the bot at all, I’ve been involved in a number of different discussions about such things so far, and opinion seems very divided on if it’s a good idea or not. In any case, for this community this is a temporary measure only to bring content here while the dust settles. I’m at about 65% so far on people liking this as opposed to not liking it. If that changes then it’ll be gone for sure. That’s assuming it’s working right and not spamming people’s feeds! Sorry about that!!

Zamboniman, (edited )
@Zamboniman@lemmy.ca avatar

Yeah, there was a bad glitch in the bot over the last few hours causing this issue. It should be fixed very soon as I’ve already done some editing and submitted a pull request with the developer. Feel free to check the community out again in a day or so and all should be well. Sorry for the spamming! As for having the bot here, fro the discussions I’ve had so far with various people it’s at about 65% in favor (assuming no glitches, of course), but if that changes then absolutely it won’t be here. And, of course, this is temporary anyway while the dust settles.

Zamboniman,
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As a long time poster on r/printSF, I’d rather not see the cross post bot at all. Let’s just let this community grow organically. Those of us still willing to discuss on Reddit can discuss there as well.

I scrolled through the posts looking for things made by local users. There’s one post by Ben Bova, and the rest are the bot. If I’m looking for discussion with people here, I effectively have to blocm the bot.

Thanks for the feedback. From the comments received so far, your vote brings it a bit closer to 50/50 (it was very strongly pro bot for the first bit). Your timing is apropos, as the bot will be taking a bit of a planned vacation regardless in a few days and we’ll see where things go from there. I too want to see the community grow by itself, and for people to bring and discuss content here. Obviously, the bot was to bring over some content into an essentially empty community to begin with to begin to spur discussion. And while there was some discussion happening on some of the posts, it was very little. But it was intended as a temporary measure regardless. We’ll see how it goes over the next two or three weeks.

Side note: I didn’t know you existed until today. I’ve also set up !futurism and !spacemusic. I suspect our prospective communities will overlap once further established. I’ll link here from the sidebars of those communities to help a bit.

That’s great. I will add those communities to the sidebar here as well. Thanks!

How to unban someone?

How can you unban someone who has been banned from a Lemmy community? I had a user post off-topic content which appeared to be trolling, but then send me paragraphs explaining how it was an error on their part. I banned them after their initial comment (because it really did just look like generic low-effort trolling), but now I...

Zamboniman,
@Zamboniman@lemmy.ca avatar

Were you able to figure out how to do this? I have the same question.

Zamboniman,
@Zamboniman@lemmy.ca avatar

For us poor schmucks that want to use this in different communities but don’t do javascript, can you let us know specifically which lines to comment out on the initial run to avoid all the backposts? Thanks.

Edit: I see a note in the updated readme that it’s not working on instances running 0.18?

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