@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.

@feditips I had a small conversation with the usually well informed server admin but he couldn’t shed much light either and agreed with me that a news account doesn’t necessarily have to be an automated account. I think this is one of those cases where different services have made use of the sometimes not very specific AP protocol in different ways.
I don’t think it’s intended to be used with RSS as a rule, there is no such specification on the settings page. I chose it as I post news articles.