Yes, I am aware how ironic it is to post this on Lemmy.
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2026
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There are a few that import Reddit posts, but there are also settings to block bots; maybe yours is set to on? But I don’t ever see bots in the comments, which is fine with me.
The bots people are generally worried about don't announce themselves to be bots.
No financial incentive for it lol
Yet.
I'm sure .ml is loaded with bots. I'm currently chatting with a person who thinks Russia is a brilliant strategist for selling oil at a steep discount.
Those people are sadly real.
I'm sure .ml is loaded with bots. I'm currently chatting with a person who thinks Russia is a brilliant strategist for selling oil at a steep discount.
Yeah, we are all bots on .ml. Not unlike you, independent free thinker following media narratives blindly
More like, I'm trying to make a narrow point about international oil markets and they keep reading it as moral judgmet, East vs West, and/or Grand Narrative stuff. Also they keep getting verifiable facts wrong, which is annoying because then I have to correct them, distracting from the oil market conversation.
Anyway the reason I believe .ml is much more likely to have a higher bot ratio than other instances is that it's a convenient concentration of Russian and Chinese friendly people, where narratives can be tested. The good ones that resonate get pushed by other members of the bot network outside the test bed (along with organic sharing and so forth). There are other test environments for narratives, but both China and Russia are surely interested in .ml more than other fediverse spaces.
To be clear, Western interests also have a presence here, but they don't have the same kind of obvious choice for an instance to hang out in and test natives. I would guess they would pick lemmy.world to have more user-noise to hide in and less fear that their instance might collapse, but fuck if I know. In any case, we're very much the backwaters and testing grounds for these bot farms. They're not interested in us as some kind of nexus for narrative control, we're just one of the many many places they test out stories and see which ones are worth amplifying with their big accounts on big platforms.
Lemmy was developed by Marxist-Leninists (.ml is the instance run by the devs), of course this attracts other people who critically support AES and countries opposing NATO/US imperialism.
Not everything is bot networks and narratives, and it would make far more sense to "test the waters" using a neutral instance with open sign ups like lemmy.world. You have users posting anti-China posts almost exclusively and even those I doubt are bots, as a contrast.
Yes I'm aware.
I am not saying everyone with dumb opinions is a bot, far from it. The world is drowning in idiots. But concentrations of message-friendly people is for sure one of the places you'd want to test narratives, not every message is intended for every audience. You need to recruit new folks to your cause and maintain your base. Messages that do well with your base are likely to attract cause-curious folks.
To be fair. It could be. In an evil Uber or door dash sort of way. Sell at a loss, make infrastructure dependent on it, hike up prices.
Do I think it will be or is way more like they are desperate for cash? Prolly
With pipeline stuff? Sure. There's an infrastructure cost involved in switching sources. With tanker and rail stuff? Nah, it's comparatively trivial to switch suppliers. Unfortunately for Russia, the most obvious declines are from pipeline sales in the first year of the war. The rest have decreased too, but those are the ones where you can just wave your hand at the graph and it's obvious. They basically can't afford to sell at market rate because their oil comes with too many indirect costs to the buyer at the moment.
Walmart does the same. Pushes out all the local grocers first.
Same experience here. I don't think I've seen a bot in the comments yet, different story on Reddit thats for sure. And when I tried the recent Digg reboot, I'm pretty sure every second or third account was a bot
There used to be PipedVideoBot who would reply to every comment containing a YouTube link with a piped.video version. It was quite annoying, people who prefer Piped usually have a redirect set up to an instance of their choice, while others use no proxy but alternative frontends like NewPipe, Grayjay or Revanced.
I also did automation on another account of mine, posting an entry from Random Tan Studio's "Humanization" series on !morphmoe@ani.social every day. No AI except waifu2x to upscale (the images were created as quite low-res bitmaps and looked very blurry when rescaled, which almost all modern clients do). I didn't consider it a bot account since I would log in myself almost every day and react to comments.