An administrative announcement.
Motherfuckers.
https://mastodon.cloud/media/oxNPAqhKHeUAAvMv1X8
Q: Why are all these bots following me?
A: Mastodon and GNU Social are /federated/ network with many individual servers. Only toots from profiles followed by someone on a given server propogate. "Follow Bots" ensure that more content is spread over more of the network. This may or may not be a good thing. And other bots may have other ideas. I'm not settled on the question myself.
A con argument: https://mastodon.social/users/pan/updates/1697694
Q: Can I block all robots easily?
A: If they're well-behaved, add #nobot to your profile bio. See: https://mastodon.social/media/cjbb9KGh16WFRvuAyis
@shivvi It does. I'm trying to capture information here for reference (and am hoping it doesn't age out too quickly).
@dredmorbius Some people don't like self promotion... I want to make sure nobody's offended
@dredmorbius and any bot that does not behave should be reported to your instance admin and to me so we can warn the offender and ban if needed !
@dredmorbius That means using up 7 characters (incl a space) of your profile to fend off stalkerbots