this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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How do we know that the people on reddit aren't talking to bots? Now, or in the future? what about lemmy?

Even If I am on a human instance that checks every account on PII, what about those other instances? How do I know as a server admin that I can trust another instance?

I don't talk about spam bots. Bots that resemble humans. Bots that use statistical information of real human beings on when and how often to post and comment (that is public knowledge on lemmy).

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[–] atro_city@fedia.io 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] enemenemu@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

that's the spiritual predecessor of lemmy

[–] atro_city@fedia.io 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I just don't get why you're asking about reddit here and asking about bot detection on lemmy. Are you actually worried that you don't know whether you're talking to a bot on lemmy and not reddit? It's just confusing to me.

[–] enemenemu@lemm.ee 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Because on lemmy we can observe it, on reddit we can't. There's a huge ¥ incentive for reddit to operate bots but not for lemmy in its current state.

[–] atro_city@fedia.io 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Why can't we observe it on lemmy?

[–] enemenemu@lemm.ee 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The other way round. We can observe it on lemmy

[–] atro_city@fedia.io 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Oops. Reverse question then. Why can we observe it on lemmy? How can we do that? Can't bots operate web browsers? How would they be detectable?

[–] enemenemu@lemm.ee 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Because we control lemmy. Any server admin can request PII from the users in order to use site. We can't control anything on reddit. Even if reddit was asking for PII like facebook, we, the people, couldn't know if all of them are actually real. It's shift of trust from reddit to many local server admins

[–] jimmy90@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

are there any lemmy instances that verify PII?

[–] russjr08@bitforged.space 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I highly doubt it, one that required PII to sign up would be very unlikely to have many users (especially in the current climate, so to speak).

And from the admin side, that sounds like a nightmare to deal with.

[–] jimmy90@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

have you heard of online id verification services run by some governments

linkedin uses them to verify users identities

what do you think of them?

[–] russjr08@bitforged.space 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I can't say that I've heard of them, no. I don't have any need (or desire) to do any sort of identity verification within any of my own personal projects (and I have not been involved with anything of the sorts at my workplace). Because of this, I don't have any insight or thoughts I can provide on them unfortunately.

In the context of Fediverse administration (or any service that you run yourself), even with a service that "handles it for you" I still personally wouldn't want to step into any of it.

[–] jimmy90@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago

i have a rule you know

to only talk to the initial reply

but for you i will break my rule as i wasn't paying attention

you are a special case

i've heard about you

you can recite shakespeare

you can write perl

you can do anything

[–] atro_city@fedia.io 1 points 1 week ago

Hmmm... that's nominally better. Which user would respond to a PII request from an admin? I for sure wouldn't. Would you? And servers could run their own bots too, no need to pretend on a browser.

But I do agree that with control of admin and choice who to federate with, it is possible to reduce the number of bots. Eliminating them is not possible, IMO. I'd be surprised if there's any defence against a bot that can control a browser and maybe even go as far as pretend to use a mouse.