Don’t worry, it’s nothing sinister or promotional or commercial!
Hypebot is a free open source add-on for servers ⧉ that fetches trending public posts from selected other servers. It does this by looking at certain servers’ trending lists, and boosting some of the public posts that are trending on those servers. The account that does the boosting is often named after the add-on, which is why you may see “hypebot” accounts boosting popular posts.
Is hypebot some kind of promotional tool?
No. It’s just a way for servers to notice public posts that are popular on other servers.
The name “hypebot” is a bit misleading as it’s not promoting or advertising anything. It is just a tool to help servers notice popular public posts. A more accurate name might be “trending posts bot”, and some hypebot accounts are called something like that instead.
Who sets up hypebot accounts? Who controls them?
Hypebot accounts are usually set up and run by the admins of smaller servers who want to see trending posts from larger servers. Very small servers may not have enough activity to generate their own page of trending posts, and the hypebot add-on lets them fetch trending public posts from other servers instead.
What happens if a post is boosted by a hypebot account?
A boosted post becomes visible on the server where the hypebot account is based. That’s all that happens, there is no other process going on.
What kind of posts can hypebot accounts boost?
Hypebot accounts can only boost posts using the visibility setting called “public”. A post with any other visibility setting (including “quiet public”) will never be boosted by hypebot accounts, because only public posts can appear on server trending lists.
How do I stop hypebot accounts from boosting my posts?
If you want to stop all hypebot accounts from boosting your public trending posts, put #nobot or #nobots in your profile. This will stop interactions from all bot software that respects the #nobot standard including all hypebot accounts.
Where can I find out technical details about hypebot?
Have a look at the Codeberg page for hypebot ⧉.
Which servers do hypebot accounts look at when boosting trending posts?
The owner of a hypebot account chooses which other servers’ trends it monitors. Each hypebot account usually has a list of these servers on its profile page.
Is “trending bot” the same as “hypebot”?
The server admin running their own hypebot add-on chooses what the add-on’s account is called. Usually they call it “hypebot” but it may also be called other things.
There are also other similar add-ons with different names that do the same thing as hypebot.
Is “Holos Discover” a form of hypebot?
No. Holos is a search engine project which has nothing to do with hypebot or trending posts.