Have you ever noticed an account on here labelled "Automated" or "Bot"?

It means the account is a bot, operating automatically without a human doing the posting.

This might sound odd, but there are many useful and entertaining bots, for example posting sports results or weather bulletins or public domain art. Other bots run interactive games of chess or D&D campaigns or text adventures.

Find out more at:

➡️ fedi.tips/why-are-some-account

...and some good bots to follow:

➡️ fedi.directory/tag/bots/

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Anopka

@feditips There is even the Mastodon server botsin.space that is dedicated to host such bots.

1
12mo
Virginia Murr

@feditips

A bit of extra advice from someone who researched fake nets (including bots) for years ... usually the good/helpful bots will have the bot creator identified in the account's bio. (Sometimes with links to their other accounts/work.)

1
12mo
💡𝚂𝗆𝖺𝗋𝗍𝗆𝖺𝗇 𝙰𝗉𝗉𝗌📱

@feditips
Very handy are the ones which boost hashtag related content, since you can't follow accounts and hashtags in the same list, but you can follow bots and other accounts in the same list.

0
12mo
SpaceLifeForm

@feditips

It may be worth noting that even if it is a bot account, the person that set it up may actually read replies. Usually not what one would expect, but you never know.

0
12mo
Sylkeweb Testing The Fediverse

@feditips I’m running an account that is not really a bot account on Friendica. There you can’t set it to being an “automated account” in the settings but I made it a so called ‘news account’. It shows up as Automated Account on Mastodon. 🤷🏼 In this case that’s at least half true (I automatically republish items from an RSS feed and also manually add posts), but in other cases news accounts might be totally manual work, so I don’t really understand why Mastodon is doing that.

1
12mo
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