It actually sounds like they are allowing bots as long as a human can intervene and is willing to verify their identity if their automated activity is detected. They are embracing slop users as long as they give them their data.

I think the main reason for the announcement, though, was to deal with the rumours that everyone will need to verify their identity (which this post seems to assume is still the case).

Personally, I’d rather see reddit remain the mainstream version of this just so that people who want to run bots for whatever reason have more reason to do it there than here. Because the commercial level ones will have more resources than lemmy admins will have to deal with it.