@Janet_52square @suearcher
I feel like they pull followers into following bots rather than people and # tags. It generates traffic in the wrong direction.

That made sense on Twitter, to make your bot account look popular, but I don't quite see a point to it here.

I block bots when I come across them.

Edit: just wondering if the bots are sharing the # tags across platforms so that Bluesky etc. also see them, and then you have no idea what folks there are doing with your toot.

@Maker_of_Things @Janet_52square @suearcher Yes, I'm blocking all of those as well, often their entire instances (since they're usually instances dedicated for these data harvesting bots).

The last one I blocked just this week even had "we respect #nobot tag in your profile!" blurb on their instance page, BUT THEY DIDN'T.

@ticho @Maker_of_Things @Janet_52square

Ah I did wonder if I could block the whole instance, I'll try that, thank you.

@suearcher @ticho @Maker_of_Things @Janet_52square

Apologies, this was me, I was experimenting with the new service and was exploring the relay option. This has now been disabled, your posts will no longer be seen by the hashtag service.

As an aside, you can indeed block the account or the entire service yourself (just like any other account or domain name), but as of this morning the connection is no longer happening so you shouldn't need to.