I use a bridge to matrix for private messages to the bot accounts, reports for posts for which there are multiple bot accounts on different instances because federation is broken for reports, and new posts to the communities (where the last one was merged just few hours ago). We are also contemplating getting ourselves the functionality to automatically message users when we take action on their post/comment.

It’s crazy how far we have to go to make moderating stuff easier/more pleasant to do. I hope lemmy improves in that by a lot at some point.

My another gripe is no ability to detect image reposts because in image heavy communities they’re very common and remembering what was posted and when is a massive pita. That would fall under a bot category and not integrated feature (but would be cool if it was deeply integrated into lemmy so situations where it would tell you if it’s a repost BEFORE you even post it could be possible) but it’s still something that makes it harder to moderate. Same goes for posting to other communities because you need to check if it was posted recently or not if you aren’t chronically online to know that already.