Not bots. Who would develop propaganda bots to for lemmy just to spite 1 particular person.
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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Ask Lemmy
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I think the trap is that you should look for accounts that seem extra normal. Those are your typical bot accounts. Impeccable spelling, and more elaborate structure than you'd typically find in a social media comment, but very "locally plausible" content.
In my experience accounts that seem weird are run by weird humans.
To me, all of the fediverse feels just the same as the platforms they set out to replace. Mastodon nowadays is like 50% bots and 50% stupid people, like twitter, just a slightly different echochamber. Lemmy feels the same as reddit to me, also echochamber-y and botty, just more dead (as in less people). Very frustrating. The german memes here are fire, though.
So-called "social" networks can have three main issues: technical (they have to work), leadership (they have to not be dickhead), and users (they also have to not be dickheads).
The first point can be handled with competent people, consensus, open source contributors, etc. (assuming no dictatorial management).
The second point can probably be handled by having a handful of decent people, transparency, accountability.
The third point, which is basically the thing that makes the content on the service… is still people. If people were obnoxious on twitter, they'll be obnoxious on bluesky, mastodon, and whatever else shows up. It's almost inevitable.
It's also why decent moderations tools are needed, which brings the question of how to do decent moderations tools that are not too extremet but still remains useful. This is not an easy task (and to my knowledge, there's no general solution to that).
Bots showing up is just the icing on the top. Without a pretty aggressive vetting system for accounts, there's not much that can be done from the service itself.
Given the general ambiance, I guess smaller community and services tailored for them might come back, the way we had tons of different forums back in the days. It might be a good solution; some form of SSO across many services to make people reachable, but no general, shared stream of messages as we have now.
tl;dr: it's not a technical problem, it's a people problem. So it won't be solved by technical solutions.
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I sometimes go on lemvotes to see who's upvoting garbage. 80% of votes are done by account with no or very little comments. I also noticed a lot of the pro zionist accounts went offline relatively all at the same time. Hard to trust anything on lemmy.
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Dead internet theory is not just a hypothesis anymore. It's an intentional business model. Enjoy what's left of online human interaction. Soon, it will all be just LLMs siloing each user individually.
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been that way since I joined.
it's crazy how I can call someone out in a low traffic community and end up with 30 downvotes in five minutes.
it's also funny how when you call different people out on similar topics you get the same word-for-word response back from weeks or months ago.
I'm not saying it's bots, but......
tbh just with how the fediverse works I would not trust vote counts here whatsoever. The downside of having no central authority over the network is that anything that lets one instance affect the whole network, like votes from bots on one instance being federated, cant be entirely trusted.
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Interesting how many people here get hung up on downvotes and advise to either block the techies, the tankies, or both. And quite hilarious how this adivice gets so quickly derailed into 'political discussions' (rather namecalling and blocking each other). I wasn't even talking about downvotes, I don't care much about them, and I try to not get involved in political stuff where people consider it a useful way to discuss about any issue, because that's just kindergarden stuff and I'd expect a bot to be able to be a little more convincing than just downvoting my post or comment. Yet another reason to spend more time offline - I'mma switch all of you off! And you! And you!!
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I am pretty sure that's just the resident weridos and their non standard opinions tbh
I got called a bot a lot early just for doing takes that were too hot for the mean poster
In the end does it matter? If the content is low quality, don’t interact with it. If the content is high quality, interact with it. Humans will always be better at producing high quality content compared to bots or trolls.
I'm coming to the conclusion that might the best way of going about it. Being even more picky than before about who I interact with is actually a good thing. If one or another insufferable person gets weeded out of the focus of my attention that's not really a problem.