Technology

If they don't blink and you hear the servos whirring, that's a pretty good sign.

The problem with almost any solution is that it just pushes it to custom instances that don't place the restrictions, which pushes big instances to be more insular and resist small instances, undermining most of the purpose of the federation.

leading to significant manipulation of public discourse

Pretending that this wasn't already a massive issue on places like reddit since years ago, with or without bots, is a little bit disingenuous.

Ban them all.

You don't.

You employ critical thinking skills in all interactions on the web.

No current social network can be bot-proof. And Lemmy is in the most unprotected situation here, saved only by his low fame. On Twitter, I personally have already banned about 15000 Russian bots, but that's less than 1% of the existing ones. I've seen the heads of bots with 165000 followers. Just imagine that all 165000 will register accounts on Lemmy, there is nothing to oppose them. I used to develop a theory for a new social network, where bots could exist as much as he want, but could not influence your circle of subscriptions and subscribers. But it's complicated...

A chain/tree of trust. If a particular parent node has trusted a lot of users that proves to be malicious bots, you break the chain of trust by removing the parent node. Orphaned real users would then need to find a new account that is willing to trust them, while the bots are left out hanging.

Not sure how well it would work on federated platforms though.

by embracing methods of verifying that a user is a real person

edit: to add this example

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-digital-identity-and-attributes-trust-framework-beta-version/uk-digital-identity-and-attributes-trust-framework-beta-version

For example, a bot on Twitter using an API call to GPT-4o ran out of funding and started posting their prompts and system information publicly.

While there's obviously botspam out there, this post is clearly a fake as anyone with the programming experience will notice immediately. It's just engagemeb bait

Fundamentally the problem only has temporary solutions unless you have some kind of system that makes using bots expensive.

One solution might be to use something like FIDO2 usb security tokens. Assuming those tokens cost like 5€. Instead of using an email you can create an account that is anonymous (assuming the tokens are sold anonymously) and requires a small cost investment. If you get banned you need to buy a new fido2 token.

PS: Fido tokens still cost too much but also you can make your own with a raspberry pico 2 and just overwrite and make a new key. So this is no solution either without some trust network.

I've been thinking postcard based account validation for online services might be a strategy to fight bots.

As in, rather than an email address, you register with a physical address and get mailed a post card.

A server operator would then have to approve mailing 1,000 post cards to whatever address the bot operator was working out of. The cost of starting and maintaining a bot farm skyrockets as a result (you not only have to pay to get the postcard, you have to maintain a physical presence somewhere ... and potentially a lot of them if you get banned/caught with any frequency).

Similarly, most operators would presumably only mail to folks within their nation's mail system. So if Russia wanted to create a bunch of US accounts on "mainstream" US hosted services, they'd have to physically put agents inside of the United States that are receiving these postcards ... and now the FBI can treat this like any other organized domestic crime syndicate.

How do we even fix this issue or prevent it from affecting Lemmy??

Simple. Just scream that everyone whose opinion you dislike is a bot.

You were targeted by someone and they used the bots to punish you. It could have been a keyword in your posts. I had some tool that would down vote any post where I used the word snowflake. I guess the little snowflake didn't like me calling him one. I played around with bots for a while but it wasn't worth it. I was a OP on several IRC networks back in the day and the bots we ran then actually did something useful. Like a small percentage of reddit bots.