First of all, I have made a small change to Lemmy to allow instance admins to set the default feed for new users. The default feed for all new lemm.ee users is actually “All” now!

I think over time, the local feed will probably improve as well for those who are interested in it, but for now “All” seems to be a much safer choice.

As for bots that just mass-post content - I am personally not a fan of them. Maybe it indeed makes sense to tune the algorithm to value bot content less that real human content (at least by a little). I will monitor the situation for a while and try to come up with some ideas.