Asklemmy

RemindMe bot is awesome

Lemmygrad has a bot which detects youtube, twitter and reddit links in your post and offers links to open source front ends like invidious, nitter and libreddit. It'd be nice if we had one of those.

I'll reply first on more general grounds. In my opinion, bots...

• should only reply to posts/comments when explicitly requested to, through a standard approach.
• should be properly tagged as bots, not just their username but also some interface element. And they should never behave in a way that mimics human beings.
• should have short, succinct output, that doesn't force other users to scroll past a lot of junk.
• should only have a descriptive output (it gives you info), not prescriptive (it doesn't tell you what to do).

Now, actually answering your question:

• a bot that links manga, anime and LN references to MyAnimeList, MangaUpdates etc. pages, like u/Roboragi does in Reddit.
• an unit conversion bot, like @[email protected] said, that also works for cooking units. (Specially when Americans say stuff like "half cup of onions", for me it's the same as "a random amount of onion"). I volunteer myself to help out gathering units for that.
• a simple Wikipedia link bot, that gives you a short excerpt of the Wikipedia link.

I'm sure something like AutoMod would eventually become useful for community moderators.

Because none of us ever read the article anyway... autotldr bot.

RemindMe was super useful

Since no one mentioned it,

Stabbot - the video stabilising bot to fix videos that the uploader didn't bother with.

Songfinder bot seems handy to prevent earworms.

Plus a lot of the other ones mentioned. Just helpful bots with a distinct purpose that come in when asked to save time or educate.

There's no bots I'm really missing hard right now, but it's worth recalling that bots are such a popular approach on Reddit specifically because the community has no way to improve reddit directly. If you want to add a feature to reddit, the ONLY way you can do it is to try to parse the text in a post/comment and the have the bot post it's own output as a comment or whatever.

With Lemmy, the code is open source and you can improve it directly. So before writing a bot to hammer the apis of an instance reading every post/comment made to a community, it's worth asking oneself if Lemmy could be improved to natively do the thing without needing a bot. Like for remind-me, what if Lemmy had a native remind-me button that direct-messaged you with a link to a post after some configurable delay. Easier to use, more efficient, no bot needed.

Now, this might be more work than writing a bot. And a bot can be a useful way to prototype some feature. It also means learning rust and JavaScript rather than python, and it means cooperating with Lemmy devs who might have concerns about performance at-scale, maintainability, or user-experience. These concerns will likely make the result better though. It's fine to do stuff via bots, but consider the possibility that directly contributing to improve Lemmy would be a better result that isn't possible in the Reddit ecosystem.

One major bot that is fediverse specific. A community syncing bot. So if two communities from different instances want to, they could have a bot that crossposts everything between each other and delete one deleted between each other. A more advanced feature to have is to have it only do certain tags, so for example [email protected] with a help/question and fedora tags could be auto posted to [email protected], and [email protected] .

I saw someone attempt to invoke a !remindme bot in some other thread. I don't know if that's actually something that exists already, but that would probably be useful for people who use it.

Video/image download bot would be super useful.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically.

A bot that would find the equivalent to a subreddit on lemmy, or correct users if they link a community incorrectly.

I've always found the ones that give a Wikipedia summary useful

A bot that listens to and tallys "goodbott" and "bad bot" comments

I would like to see something that converted a reference to a Lemmy community into an instance-agnostic link to that community.

But as you astutely pointed out in this post, some things would be better as improvements to Lemmy than as bots that poke at it from the outside. I think that's one of those things.

A repost detecting bot might be helpful

Amputatorbot!!

Remindme! in 10 years

For some LoTR flavoring, Gandalf bot is always welcome.

I'd love to see some of the bots you'd see on sports subreddits, things like a Match Thread updating with live scores, substitutions etc, without a mod having to do all that work themselves.

Are there rules on Behaw regarding allowing bot accounts?

There's one that's used in the music subs called RoundupForReddit which collects top posts across each of the subs that could be really useful, especially given how many lemmy instances there are.

I really hope it won't be needed, but we should probably have an nwordcount bot ready to go, just in case