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Bots are running rampant. How do we stop them from ruining Lemmy?

Social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit are increasingly infested with bots and fake accounts, leading to significant manipulation of public discourse. These bots don't just annoy users—they skew visibility through vote manipulation. Fake accounts and automated scripts systematically downvote posts opposing certain viewpoints, distorting the content that surfaces and amplifying specific agendas.

Before coming to Lemmy, I was systematically downvoted by bots on Reddit for completely normal comments that were relatively neutral and not controversial​ at all. Seemed to be no pattern in it... One time I commented that my favorite game was WoW, down voted -15 for no apparent reason.

For example, a bot on Twitter using an API call to GPT-4o ran out of funding and started posting their prompts and system information publicly.

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/chatgpt-bot-x-russian-campaign-meme/

Example shown here

Bots like these are probably in the tens or hundreds of thousands. They did a huge ban wave of bots on Reddit, and some major top level subreddits were quiet for days because of it. Unbelievable...

How do we even fix this issue or prevent it from affecting Lemmy??

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  • Maybe stop letting any random person create an account with no verification whatsoever

    • Are you THE AlexanderESmith of social.alexanderesmith.com fame??

      • Indeed I am! But I don't let all that fame go to my head (I have a special deal for autographs right now, just $20!)

        But seriously, while I consider lackluster (or completely missing) new-account verification to be the much larger issue, federation is one to watch as well. My instance is so-named because I'm the only one who uses it.

        At least it's a fairly significant effort to set up an entire instance for a single user. That should keep spam from single-user instances reasonably low. And if someone sets up a vaguely legitimate-looking instance, but enough users are muted/blocked/moderated/etc, you can just block the entire instance. Changing instance names is more of a hassle than nuking it entirely and starting over (new domain, new database, new IPs if the admins are paying attention, etc).

        • Sounds reasonable I suppose. I don't know a whole lot of the under the hood workings of Lemmy and I'm not going to pretend I do. I was mostly poking fun in the spirit of that one guy that kept getting asked if he was from some forum

          Edit: The Reference

          • heh, indeed.

            Yeah, technically I run mbin (a fork of the now-defunct kbin) which has both threaded (reddit/lemmy/etc) and microblog (deadbird/mastodon/etc) features. I originally set myself up on kbin.social , but after it died I decided to not let my account (history/rep/preferences/subscriptions/etc) continue to be subject to the whim of random admins that might run out of funding, see something shiny, do something stupid and get defederated, etc. I thought "Wait, I'm a random admin, I'll just make my own instance, with blackjack, and hookers..."

            • Hell yeah! I dig it. Thanks for the explanation. Why did they skip over lbin?

              • Ha!

                Well, kbin seems to have gotten its name from a longer form, "karabin" (see the - defunct - polish devlog URL referenced here: https://karab.in/m/karabinDevlog/wpisy). I have no idea what it means, but it could be Polish (though - according to Google translate - "kara" is "penalty" and "karabin" is "rifle", and I don't think that's the theme the dev was going for, so maybe it was a portmanteau that I just won't get as a native English speaker).

                As for mbin, it was forked from kbin by a guy named Melroy, so I'm betting that's where the M came from.

                • Hey, you're a good guy for informing me on all of this. Thank you so much for taking the time

                  • No problem, happy to contribute where I can. It's one of the main reasons I joined the fediverse in the first place 👍

                  • Ah, one of the guys in the Mbin matrix chat shared this with me (from the original Kbin dev);

                    Ernest: Hi, good to see you here :) 1 honestly have no idea what the pronunciation is. lt's a reference to the Linux /sbin, a container for things that are important to you. This is intentional, I want /kbin to be perceived as each individual instance. Each instance is different. Each community is diferent. That's what's cool about the Fediverse.

                    Looks like it was from discord, but the image upload isn't working for me right now, I should complain to my instance admin... :p

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