What bots would you like to see on Lemmy?

RemindMe bot is awesome

Beat me to it. Came here to say exactly this.

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 think this would work better as a built-in link filter enhancement in the instance and community options, so for example, all communities who customized their filter to replace "twitter.com" and "t.co" links will automatically convert them to "nitter.instance.com" links when the comment is posted. Link filtering can also be used to block links to scam and unknown websites.
- I honestly prefer using an addon such as LibRedirect. Just because I want open-source front ends, doesn't mean everyone does, and it's easy enough to handle on a user-level.
- Filtering is different than offer alts

And I would like to see a federation-wide policy that all bots must be clearly identified as bots (an attribute on their account). And features in the site code to block all bots as a user preference.
- Lemmy has an option to mark accounts as bots. For example, check out the profile of @ParentiBot@lemmygrad.ml.
- I agree with this. Similar to how discord handles bots, it should be labeled
- Also, there is a setting to block bots.
Should be fine if we can get a setting to have no bots respond to you unless you summon them

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 @iorale@lemmy.fmhy.ml 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 was thinking of running an instance which houses just bots. In theory, that'd make it easy to have an easy to remember URL and usernames, like !bgg@bot.pls or something. If I can get a URL that makes sense I might consider something like this. It'd keep it small enough to call, and make sure they're always 100% intentional.
This is mainly because I don't want to be a source of annoyance for anyone, and I've seen too many people annoyed at the "natural response" bots that pop in all the time on reddit.
If they're on their own instance, a whole instance can block that instance if they don't want bots, or block specific bots if they prefer.
- Or even better - what if they need to request specific bots? That is: the bot needs human consent to act on first place. That means that bots will be only used if they're clearly useful for the instance, community or the user, not just a "yeah this bot is annoying and adding noise but why bother?"
- mastodon already has botsin.space, depending on how well lemmy & masto interoperate (in theory they'll be fine because AP, but these kinda things tend to mess up in practice. lemmy still doesn't do authorized fetch afaik) hosting bots there & calling them from lemmy should work.
- That's actually a really bright idea. Makes bots easier to identify, and easier to avoid if preferred.
GNU units to the rescue! https://www.gnu.org/software/units/
- ...wow.
  I just installed it. I was expecting something like "ah, it knows that a cup should be a certain amount of mililitres, but what if I ask it in grams? Then I put "1 cup sugar", "grams"... and it returned 200g. It couldn't find flour so I used butter, 226g. It works!
  Checking /usr/share/units/definitions.units, the devs had the insight to add a lot of cooking stuff to it. Also a way to define your own units. The syntax is an arse but I guess that the bot could handle it.
  This would be great as the "guts" of a really good conversion bot.
r/fanfiction and r/HPfanfiction have a fanfic link summary bot. you do linkffn(STORYID) or linkao3(STORYID) and it posts a summary. was useful.
- I would have never guessed how to request the bot, if you didn't show it. That's another reason why I think that there should be a standard way to request bots, it increases discoverability. For contrast, Roboragi:
  {this} looks for anime
  <this>
  looks for manga
  ]this[ looks for light novel
  |this| looks for visual novel
  You probably wouldn't guess it from the fanfic link summary bot either.
  I think that a simple common syntax that could be used is @!bot-name [options] ["]data to process["], at least when users are requesting it regardless of community. It's hard to hit it by accident, but still easy to type, and flexible enough to allow multiple bots to follow it. So for example:
  @!fanfic-link-bot ao3 STORYID // looks for STORYID in Archive of Our Own
  @!animanga-bot ln "story name" // looks for a light novel called "story name"
  @!units-converter-bot grams "five cups of flour" // converts five cups of flour into grams
  etc.
  Then if community moderators are allowed to call bots to perform functions automatically, without the user requesting them, they could also set up synonyms as shorthands. for example people in c/fanfiction could simply type "ffao3 STORYID" instead, less keystrokes for the same result.
should only reply to posts/comments when explicitly requested to
I assume you mean somelike like !remindme 4 days but then one of your examples is "half a cup of onions" and I can't see your fictional American thinking to trigger the bot - which means someone would have to reply to that person to request a bot conversion.
Similarly, there's a music IDing bot on reddit that responds to human-language questions like "whats the song" which is 100% ok with me (and the users have always been pleasantly surprised from what I've seen).
- I can’t see your fictional American thinking to trigger the bot - which means someone would have to reply to that person to request a bot conversion.
  I think that they would, given enough community encouragement to do so; things like "OP, please add @!cookunitsbot to your post" go a long way. Roboragi in r/manga for example works well in this way.
  Alternatively, if my "I think" above is wrong: then "requested" could also include "explicitly set up by the mods", not just "triggered by the user". For me it already solves the main issue, that is bots chasing you across communities to boss you around or vomit trivia.
  Similarly, there’s a music IDing bot on reddit that responds to human-language questions like “whats the song” which is 100% ok with me (and the users have always been pleasantly surprised from what I’ve seen).
  Frankly I think that having a standard way to request bots is better for everyone (including the bot developers) than having it reply human questions. Even then, as long as it doesn't do this thing outside of its own "turf" (music communities), it should be fine.
- Tracking upvotes and good not/bad not replies is helpful feed back to, capturing that seem like a good idea

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

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

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.

Personally, I've been thinking about bots, but I plan to run them on my own instance or their own dedicated instance. That way, they don't add any load at all with their interactions, and only their comments are synced to other instances. That also makes it easy for whole instances or communities to kick them if they don't want them there.

Video/image download bot would be super useful.

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

You missed the bleep-bloop!

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

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

Also the one that turned Wikipedia mobile links into desktop ones.

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 !linux@lemmy.ml with a help/question and fedora tags could be auto posted to !fedora@lemmy.ml, and !linux_questions@lemmy.ml .

On that note, I'd like to see something like "crossposts" supported.

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.

Maybe features like this could actually work as plugins.
If it's the same post I saw, that was one of the main devs - he then mused that someone should create that bot here.

I made a couple of bots that could give you some ideas:

https://github.com/SleeplessOne1917/lemmy-ocr-bot

https://github.com/SleeplessOne1917/lemmy-translator-bot

https://github.com/SleeplessOne1917/lemmy-art-bot

Thanks for sharing. I checked out a few other bots in different languages, but the typescript one seemed really nice and easy to setup. How much resources does it use typically?
- I haven't actually checked resource usage tbh.

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

there was one on reddit called reportsleuthbot But isn't it a little hard to make? It might be too complex for learning python...
- fair point

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

Definitely this. Was thinking about making a bit myself to do this as the whole direct link thing is such a pain but I don’t have any experience in making bots so I’d be even happier if someone else manages to make one!
Something that automatically converts https://beehaw.org/c/support to [support](/c/support) so they are useable across instances.___

None, honestly.

Same. Bots are spam.

Amputatorbot!!

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?

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

This isn't necessarily a bot in and of itself...but, could function as one. It would be really cool if bots could reshare content from other fediverse sources into a group automatically, but preserve attribution to the original posters.

Would be really handy for, say, automatically sharing PeerTube videos to a community dedicated to watching them.

If you do this please share the code!

The Imperial to Decimal bot, it helps a lot

Can we get a crypto tipping bot?

Automoderator!