What is the effect of ticking "This is a bot account" in Mastodon?

Question

If I edit my profile I get the option to mark my account as a bot account:

Currently the Mastodon documentation mentions the attribute, but doesn't explain what effect it has:

• https://docs.joinmastodon.org/api/entities/#account
• https://docs.joinmastodon.org/api/authentication/

This bot guide mentions the setting, but again doesn't explain what it does:

• https://botwiki.org/resource/tutorial/how-to-make-a-mastodon-botsin-space-app-bot/

How is this signal communicated in machine-facing transmission and/or human-facing UX? What are the implications (e.g. toots won't appear in some context)?

Answer 1

After checking the source code:

• Shows a 'bot' badge where user/moderator/admin badges would be shown
  (app/helpers/stream_entries_helper.rb).
• Does not contribute to "trending tags" statistics
  (app/models/trending_tags.rb).

• ActivityPub actor record has type "Service" instead of "Person"
  (app/serializers/activitypub/actor_serializer.rb).

  (How the actor record is interpreted depends on the receiving site. Mastodon itself recognizes incoming "Service" records as a bot account. Pleroma currently does not distinguish between different types at all.)