They’re doing the opposite.

A new user comes to Lemmy and sees nothing but the same posts they saw on Reddit, but now all of them have no comments and almost no upvotes because there’s so much of it posted to such a small environment that everything else gets drowned out.

After blocking every one of the dogshit bots I see just as many quality posts, by actual users, with actual comments.

I barely see them probably due to the communities I’m subscribed to, but to me Lemmy looks plenty active without them.

Eventually I can see getting rid of them, but for now they’re keeping Lemmy active.

Do a multitude of automated posts without comments and conversation really count as activity? Before I simply hid bot posts via settings, I’d rarely see any conversations appearing on Reddit reposts. Even now if you look at probably the most prolific bot instance/account behind this, Lemmit.online bot, you can see this for yourself.

Interesting archival project, I suppose, but it certainly doesn’t seem to generate activity in terms of conversation, besides posts like this.

I have blocked them and things dont get that quiet at all.

I think it is better to have a small number of posts with real engagement than a large number of posts with no engagement on them at all