this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Fediverse

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founded 1 year ago
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In just 3 days more than 500.000 new users!! Lemmy for power, we will be legion, expect us!

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The question is: what percentage of those users are bots? And does it matter?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The way I've heard of things in federated instances, if one instance becomes bot filled and toxic, then other instances will unfederate them. It makes it worthwhile for mods of that instance to run a healthy server.

There's a bot running on one instance now that identifies itself as such and is reposting content from reddit with links going to the original article. These sorts of bots I can accept.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

We really need some better moderating tools between instances. At this point, the only solution is defederation, but that's really not a good solution.

Maybe some kind of way to restrict, but not eliminate, users between federations? Some age that accounts from instance A have to reach to post/comment in instance B? Maybe, communities that are restricted by instance? We'd have to be careful of it not getting too complicated and driving away users.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It matters because it means which Lemmy is growing exponentially! Ofc some of those users would be bots, but I highly doubt a lot of them.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are instances with over 9k accounts and like 5 posts. There's a lot of bots.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hope the staff works to solve this.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The problem is that there is no "the staff" as such. The developers can add tools, but if people want bot instances, there will be bot instances. The instance administrators can just not federate with them (which makes the most sense to me) but that will be on an instance by instance basis.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I understand, thank you. Then of that way how possible avoid that Lemmy.world for example would filled with bots.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well Lemmy.worlsld can defederate with the bit instances. That won't affect any other instance though.

As far as bots making accounts on Lemmy.world, they've added a captcha which helps a lot.

I hope we'll get some improved moderating tools that help eventually as well.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

The reason it is likely a lot of bot accounts is someone explained how to exploit a glitch that creates thousands of bot accounts within minutes. The day after they posted the exploit, suddenly Lemmy started growing rapidly. It’s just too coincidental to not be mostly bots