Following Lemmy on Mastodon is a truly terrible idea. If you subscribe to a community here on Mastodon, you will get every post in every thread. Your Masto feed will be an unreadable pile of out-of-context garbage. There's no over-zealous bot. That is just how it works.
Kbin allows you to use both Lemmy and Mastodon but doesn't crowbar them into the same feed. That might be your best bet.
Stands to perfect reason. Lemmings are essentially large rodents, mastadons are essentially large elephants, elephants don't get along with mice, mastadons don't get along with lemmings. Science!
I assume you're following from Mastodon? Unfortunately that's how Mastodon works with groups - you see boosts of every single comment on your feed.
You're better off with a Lemmy or Kbin account if you want to follow groups.
(and for the sake of clarity, this news account you're following isn't a bot - it's a group)
Ahhh. See, I didn't realize the "@news" I was following on Mastodon was actually a Lemmy group. I though it was specific to Mastodon, and expected it would be a news repeater/aggregator. Didn't know it would also include all responses to the news posts.
It goes with a larger confusion on my part about how Mastodon works, I guess.
Adding, I found an option in my Mastodon client to hide boosts from my time line. Which solves my original problem. 🙂
Yeah, the way it works with groups is not great. There are news feeds on Mastodon which are probably a better option to follow from there.
I'm afraid that is simply how communities work on Mastodon. This way the comments can be propagated in threads, without using tags.
I don't know which client are you using but in fedilab I see option "hide boosts from @news@lemmy.world" in the three dots menu, after I started watching the account. Maybe that could be your solution?
Boy, it would sure be funny if users decided to just spam this thread with multiple replies about how it's not a bot thing but just the way Mastodon works with fediverse threads.
that's not a news bot, that's an issue with Lemmy federation. you can create a GitHub ticket for Lemmy or sign up for Lemmy and browse it there, federation really isn't the best for following posts and/or communities.
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