shinobu is a bot

That’s right. @shinobu@ani.social is the bot that was posting episode discussion threads in !episode_discussion@ani.social. However, shinobu hasn’t been working on the winter seasonal shows, so I have relaxed rules for this community to allow people to create threads for discussion here, at least until shinobu comes back or another solution is put in place to allow for episode discussion of currently airing shows.

probably because I blocked shinobu?

Either you have blocked shinobu or you have unchecked “Show bot accounts” in your user settings. I just checked your local instance and the posts are in the community there.

way to block/hide/ignore episode discussions

I would love it if this were possible right now. Lemmy badly needs something like a post flair system that lets you only see or ignore certain flairs. I understand not everybody wants to discuss currently airing shows, so I am trying to remain sensitive to both segments of the community as best I can. This is why, in the past, episode discussion threads were separated into a different community.

I think that if we turned on a bot posting every episode discussion thread to this community (like reddit does for example), it would completely drown out everything else. There are maybe 3-4 news items on a busy day here compared to ~5-10 different episodes that air on any given day. Lemmy simply doesn’t have the volume of user-generated content (yet) to compete with a bot creating that many threads every day.

So, as a halfway point for now, I am allowing discussion threads here, but only if they are user-created. This means that any discussion thread here should have at least one actual human partaking in the conversation, compared to a deluge of threads that sit around with zero comments. Conversely, it means that people are more likely to see discussion threads that are not relevant to what they want from this community.

I am open to suggestions though if there are things we might be able to change to make things better. I can’t say I am super thrilled with the current situation.

Rumor has it that on very still nights, you can still hear shinobu wandering the digital wasteland, looking for winter shows that are missing from her database. She is doomed to never find them without a benevolent human to intercede and provide her the missing metadata. It begs the question, is shinobu real if she isn’t posting? Does shinobu dream of a ghost in the shell?

The real answer is hopefully soon. I know chaorace said that they plan on doing it late at night so as not to destroy the local feed during the day when the instance is the busiest. I keep waking up each morning expecting to see 50+ shinobu posts, but not yet. I actually have been keeping a post draft ready to populate for the day that shinobu returns to try to gather all her links in one place. In fact, this post was mostly a copy/paste of what I have prepared to try to organize the shinobu post dump.