What does a Bluesky user see when they're followed?

[ELLIOTTCABLE]

In particular, is the initiating user mentioned?

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Slight rant on the topic:

It kinda grosses me out to imagine my old friends getting random DMs with some anonymous 'some rando on Mastodon wants to follow you, go interact with this thing you've never heard of so they can do so!'.

I would really prefer to be able to customize, or at least be specified in, the interaction. The problem being, of course, that that doesn't work if the bot doesn't want to message the same person multiple times until they've consented, and somebody else has already initiated the consent-process before I get there …

While on the other side, I can understand why the bot would want to avoid pestering the same person multiple times, it does seem a little frustrating. The only workaround I can see is to manually sign up for an actual BlueSky account, so I can send a more personalized message with a little more information about why they got the DM from the bot.

I think, in my ideal world, the bridge-bot would message people on either side multiple times even if it wasn't responded to the first time. Some form of exponential back-off ("… a third person has tried to follow you from Mastodon; there are now three pending followers", "… there are now ten people waiting to follow you from Mastodon", and so on) and an opt-out / "STOP" response seem to cover the potential annoyance, but I also recognize my bias here as someone who does actually want to use the bot. Ugh.

[snarfed]

Yes! I totally get the frustration here. Sorry for the trouble.

Customizing the text of the DM is #1473 , feel free to follow that. And exponential backoff is a good idea! I'm reluctant to keep investing effort and adding complexity into hacks like these just to work around the painful UX of the bridge being opt in, but I'll keep it in mind.