OP I agree with you, it's a great idea imo.
I've been a moderator before on a Discord server with +1000 members, for one of my FOSS projects,
and maintenance against scam / spam bots grew so bad,
that I had to get a team of moderators + an auto moderation bot + wrote an additional moderation bot myself!..

Here is the source to that bot, might be usable for inspiration or just plain usable some other users:
github.com/Rikj000/Discord-Aut…

I think it will only be a matter of time before the spam / scam bots catch up to Lemmy,
so it's good to be ahead of the curve with auto-moderation.

However I also partially agree with @dohpaz42, auto-moderation on Reddit is very, uhm, present.
Imo auto moderation should not really be visible to non-offenders.

Banning members on their username. Locking down an entire community because of a small group of people spamming. Deleting posts because an account isn’t old enough?

Why not throw in the system to have to approve posts before they get published? Really make the community welcoming.

It was said in another comment above that this tool is easily abused by “overzealous mods”, but I believe the real problem are overzealous programmers.

Reddit failed for reasons, and I believe automod was one of them. But you’ll do you, and nothing I say can change that.

That is a salient point, but I submit that if an instance is so big that the moderator(s) can't handle it, the instance should shut down sign-ups and/or split into smaller instances.

The Fediverse should work to reject centralization, not enable its proliferation.

Alright. Sounds fair. Instead of taking dangerous actions, I’ll make it create a report instead.

Thank you! Frankly, if done this way I'd be excited to use it ASAP.

Though I'll probably keep the feature to punish members by their usernames via regex or word blacklist.

This right here is the attitude that I have a problem with. I can think of one user who would get blacklisted right away because of their username alone. And that does not sit right with me.

The problem with something like this is that people start to dislike it more with experience. People have to be less experienced to become more experienced, and so it's a certainty that there will be a lot of moderators that misuse it.

I also don't mean to sound like a gnome dev, but what is actually the use case for this?

You mean as if the bot was a helper and not the admin itself?

Madness!

Honestly a bot moderator is just open source enshittification of the fediverse if you did it like this. Bots have no nuance, do not understand context and are generally unable to apply reason to a situation.

The most egregious suggestion is user name based bans, this is 100% going to remove a bunch of users without real cause. Or having automod comment the same irrelevant headline on every single post is just causing spam and kills the comment count function.

In my opinion the bots should do all the tediousness for the moderators, and there may even be scenarios where a bot content filter could be invaluable, but in general any tool you put out there will also be used to its fullest extent by at least one person.

Like cops with too many powers, eventually they abuse it for everything.

What exactly am I to do when mods use my bot maliciously? I just try to program features into the bot that might be used by the moderators. Everything is optional, if the features are used maliciously, it's not my fault but the moderators'. What fault does the creator of knives have when they are being used to murder people instead of cutting vegetables?

I do appreciate your comment though, some misc tasks don't necessarily need to exist such as welcome messages and auto comments on posts. Actually I'll remove welcome messages, they are a waste of API calls. Maybe auto comment on posts as well but scheduled posts are (most likely) staying. It is a moderation bot after all. I'll consider your compliant. Thanks.