Our Automated Account Experiment¶

Over the course of the month of September 2024, any accounts that send public posts and are deemed to be automated (marked as such or not) will be temporarily limited on our instance.

As we don't have any known automated accounts on our instance at this present time, the experiment is mainly focused on automated accounts on other instances that periodically publicly post on the federated timeline.

While we cannot guarantee that all automated accounts will be caught (especially those who don't mark themselves as being automated), we are confident that our methods will catch the vast majority of them and will tweak things accordingly.

As for those accounts which are not automated caught up in being mistakenly limited, we will make sure to lift the limitations as soon as possible.

What Is An Automated Account¶

An automated account in this instance is an account that periodically posts without an user input.

For the majority, they are posting based on RSS feeds for example News Outlets while others may be set up to spam or promote certain things.

Why¶

The Fediverse is a social network and as such, we want to encourage real people to interact with each other. Automated accounts can sometimes disrupt the flow of posts with meaningless and repetitive content, which can be frustrating for users.

Hiding these generally low engagement/interaction accounts from view will help make it easier for users to find and engage with other users and content that they find thought-provoking and interesting.

What Happens At The End Of September¶

We will review the results and any user comments and decide whether to make this a permanent change. However the plan is to remove any account restrictions and revert them back to their original state at the end of the experiment.

How To Contact Us¶

If there is something you wish to discuss, address or seek clarification, then please do not hesitate to contact the team by email [email protected] or DM us at @[email protected]

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