Everyone on Lemmy is a bot except me
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
77 points (87.4% liked)
Lemmy
12572 readers
5 users here now
Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
All your base are belong to us
Everyone on Lemmy is me, except this bot.
Different to:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_dog.jpg
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog
On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
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Test: if it says "hey guys, remember how great Reddit was, we should totally go back!?" - then it's a bot:-P.
You have too much faith in redditors
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I work in tech, this wouldn’t surprise me.
Where there are eyeballs there is spam. People even put spam in the Google Analytics referral field and that’s only ever going to get seen by the site owner.
It really says nothing about the health of the ecosystem, if it’s moderated and not filling the frontpage it’s only an issue for the server admins.
I’ve fought spammers and one alone could create these numbers in a day.
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That's worrying. Though at least it seems they're mostly confined to a few particular instances. Defederating is a great tool that will definitely mitigate the worst of it, but at the same time this is uncharted water - there's no real way of knowing what exactly will happen in a large scale attack.
Just creating accounts isn't an attack, but it's going to suck when there actually is one. I wonder if they'll try to be subtle and use AI or recycled content, or if they'll just use the accounts for spam or DDoS?
Probably they are getting ready for some vote manipulation and astroturfing for the long run.
You know, in case Lemmy and the Fediverse really get mainstream enough to move the public opinion in some way.
Having a thousand accounts that can upvote a seemingly innocent post made by an active and "real" account is always useful.
Yeah good point. I think these particular bot instances are being way too obvious to do any major damage - not when it's as simple as it is to defederate them - but what'll happen when it's not 100k bots on one instance, but 1000 instances with 100 bots apiece?
Let's hope Lemmy gets the tools needed to deal with this. I wonder how Mastodon does it? They've been around a while, I'm sure they've had similar issues.
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This is incorrect human. Please go about your regular day and don't forget to visit www.maybeascam.ml !
Thanks, will check it out. :)
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Every new account isn't a bot, though. We don't have real numbers to work with yet.
When reddit migration begun we saw a huge bump in users and it was steadly stabilising and less users were joing, then this huge bump happened. You can go browse lemmy instances and see how many instances are ghost instances with 0 posts and comments that have tens of thousands of users.
Do also note- instances with little activity aren't that unusual though-
My instance for example- I don't really have any communities here, other then a few local to my server. As such, its activity... is pretty low. Everything happens elsewhere.
There a new influx in the user migration as well, as some subreddits started pinning lemmy and kbin.social instances on their subs. Also if you go on protest subreddits (such as ModCoord and Save3rdPartyApps) almost every post has a thread/comment redirecting people to the fediverse.
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Yay! (Not a bot)
1.2 mil bot accounts? Can they each send me $1?
How about 1.6m (from 1.7m total) bot accounts?
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I've yet to see any of them start posting. On my instance none of them could pass email validation because the emails were fake. I imagine this is true for many instances with a ton of bot sign-ups.
I think just reporting sign-ups as "users" is misleading. The user count on lemmy should reflect only approved/activated accounts, imo.
Damn. Am I bot?
I'm not a bot I swear
i, for one, welcome our robot overlords.
Ah, you see, I've already learned the perfect way to disable all the bots with a single phrase...
THIS STATEMENT IS FALSE!
Are they doing anything to solve this? Because if not this platform will die
More robust instances will have to defederate instances with high concentration of bots and monitor their own new users. Maybe also implement email verification or captchas
Instances already have an ability to turn on both captchas and email verification.
Both should be turned on by default, imo.
Absolutely agree.
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Devs will have some hard weeks (probably months) facing the new challenges that come with the exodus. Not even mentioning all the work needed to counteract eventual (probable) malevolent subterfuges such as these bot swarms.
I'll make sure to buy them some coffee. Jugs of.
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@Martineski Since you're all new to this place, I'm just hijacking this thread to present you two, very lovely robots - @scream and @catgpt
@petrescatraian @scream @Martineski @lemmy nyanyaaaaaaaaaa meowmeowmeow meowmeow miau miaou mewmew miaumiau ñañaña meowmeowmeow miaumiaumiau nyanyanyaaaaaaaaa няня
'beep boop boop bop boop boop beep' Not a a robot S3e49a
My name is Connor. I am the Android sent by Cyberlife.
So about same as Reddit?
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