Lemmy has multiplied it's number of users (maybe more accurately accounts) in just few days. How much do you think is the percentage of bot accounts? Is Lemmy having problem with bot farming?
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
78 points (96.4% liked)
Fediverse
17698 readers
6 users here now
A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
Getting started on Fediverse;
- What is the fediverse?
- Fediverse Platforms
- How to run your own community
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Experience, mainly.
I used to run a phpbb forum, on average the bot signups outnumbered the real people 10 or 20 times. And that was with some fairly robust anti spam measures in place - something I think this platform is too new to have properly sorted out yet.
I may be wrong, I don't know how the back end here works, but any place where people can post publicly will be infested with bot signups very quickly. The only real variable is how good the anti spam measures are.
What is something someone can gain by swarming an instance or forums like yours with bots? I cant wrap my head around it. Also if someone has an instance and swarms it with bot accounts, it may seem like you got a popular instance but where is the revenue if there are noone who is able to click an ad? Do they do it just for the lols?
Spin up 50 bots.
Sign them all up for lemmy.
Let accounts interact/age.
Sell accounts to companies who want to advertise as one of the cool kids.
Happened on reddit nonstop.
Except that Lemmy doesn't show overall karma, so there's no use in doing any of that here.
Any conversation, be it political or commercial. All it takes is something sounding confident, a grain of truth and lots of upvotes to convince people.
That's why I like seeing downvoted as a red flag people can pay attention to
@GizmoLion @1337tux @TheAngryBad @DerWilliWonka I am on board with this
@realcaseyrollins @GizmoLion @1337tux @DerWilliWonka @TheAngryBad meaning you want to sell fedi accounts to capitalists?
@fu @GizmoLion @1337tux @DerWilliWonka @TheAngryBad I'm not on board with the selling part tbh, but I like the bot idea, it worked for #Reddit like the guy said
I feel like you're reading a completely different conversation...
@GizmoLion @realcaseyrollins @1337tux @DerWilliWonka @TheAngryBad its not likely, but with how the Fediverse works its possible, whether slow federation between certain servers (for example I frequently will have posts Friendica tells me have posted to 130/135 servers within a minute but those last few can take days or never post at all) also you guys might not both see the same conversation based on who you've blocked, or been blocked by, etc. If you ever want to verify, you should be able to view it on their instance (on Kbin this is what is listed under MORE as LINK TO FEDIVERSE)
@realcaseyrollins @GizmoLion @1337tux @DerWilliWonka @TheAngryBad if it's not a PUBLIC conversation of course you won't be able to see it on their server if you don't have an account on that server that is included in the private body (like Friendica's default of "friends only")
Looks like you are @ing someone I can't see.
Well, that's the first major point against this fediverse business... Who's going to stick around to have a conversation when everyone's only getting bits of it? That's kinda antithetical to discussion...
@DerWilliWonka @1337tux @TheAngryBad there are cetainly some who do it for the lulz, and there are some who probably do it as a way to encourage others to make security changes to the platform. Personally, I think it would be more useful to file issues via git, but what do I know, I'm just an old-timer who quit college after failing security class, and thereby losing my scholarship.
In my particular case (as was the case with most forums in the day), it was really just about spamming boards with links to whatever shitty ED pills or crypto scam they were trying to sell.
They were never really sophisticated, but never really had to be either. A spammer could spend a few minutes writing a script for a bot to crawl the web looking for phpbb signup pages, then try to create an account on any it could find and immediately post the links. They could post hundreds of links on dozens of different forums with just a few minutes work - and then do it all again tomorrow with a bunch of new signups.