Constance VariableI don't think follow bots are a good idea, because they make the federated timeline the same on every node. Without them, the federated timeline is still an expression of the interests of the node's users.
Rysiekúr (old account)@lambadalambda that's an interesting point. However, instances that are not running follow bots will not have this issue. So in the end it's up to the instance admin, if they want to make it easier for users to find other potentially interesting users (by running follow bots), or do they prefer to keep the federated timeline a better reflection of local users' interests. :)
@rysiek the problem of user discovery is so bad on mastodon because there's no publicly visible timeline. When I was starting my instance and looking for people to follow, I'd just look at the public timelines of other gnu social servers. Of course, that's not possible with mastodon, so you need the bots.
MMN-o ✅⃠@lambadalambda Then again maybe people prefer to look up friends through friends rather than through public timelines. Public timelines can also be extremely overwhelming for some .)
@mmn Sure, but follow bots have nothing to do with that, or not?
Follow bots, as thinfs are right now, help create more complete locally stored conversations etc.