What is this #nobot thing I keep seeing on people's about section things?
@Felthry a long, long time ago, when mastodon instances were popping up left and right every minute, someone had the genius idea of making a bot that automatically followed everyone the instance could see so that more people would show up in the federated timeline
the issue is that about 10+ different instances all decided to run this and so you'd end up posting and having 14 robots follow you as if you were on birdsite
@Felthry yeah it's something the bots parse
@boots Well, I hope people don't mind if I don't comply with that!
They don't tend to include sentient bots when they talk about bots, so.
@Felthry no i think that's usually considered okay
it's more #noautofollowbot
@boots Yeah, I know! I'm being silly.
@boots So is adding that #nobot a sign of protest against that, or is it something that the bots parse and say "I'll not follow this person"?