Mastodon

I haven't settled on an opinion in this case, but I think there is a bit of nuance to be had.

Look at the examples of Lemmy's Reddit and HackerNews Reposters. Some are viewed favourably, some unfavourably, some mixed.

Compare the lululemon bot, lemmit.online and alien.top. I have all these blocked btw, but some are more useful than others.

In the first case, it's very useful for users interested in lululemon, they can get the activity from the subreddit without needing to touch Reddit. Anyone not interested simply blocks either the bot or the community and move on with their day. I follow a PC sales community that is essentially the same thing though.

lemmit.online is great for anyone that misses Reddit's drivel. On that instance, various popular communities are cloned so Lemmy users don't feel too disconnected from them. Now, there is very little interaction, no mirrored comments and few original comments on that instance but it's not a big problem for lurkers that can just follow the reddit links. Anyone not interested or thinks it's spam can just block the lemmit bot and suddenly all of that goes away. Some instances defederated to keep the default view uncluttered, but it's also possible now to block the instance in Lemmy alpha 19.

For alien.top, you have an instance with a bunch of automatically created users that the original Reddit user can supposedly claim their username. Then the posts from subreddits around a topic get posted to a specific instance. One about sports, one about cars/mechanics, one about art. I can't remember where these all were. It sure flooded Lemmy with posts from OPs that don't reply. Pre v19, users couldn't block the thousands of these accounts that appeared. So many instances blocked it after a week and had to track down all the servers alien.top bots posted to because defederating just alien.top wasn't enough. Reception was generally negative.

You can see there are multiple levels of interaction, which people can be for or against.