scsi

joined 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

We have two Fediverse patterns emerging (talking both mastoverse and lemmyverse here) which have caught my eye:

  • For-profit websites using their own Masto instances to subvert how the URL scheme and redirects work to push all clicks on all their "Fediverse" links over to their website infected with a billion ads and trackers generating them click-revenue.
  • Operators setting up many (I know of one user/group running 20 of these) Lemmy instances named for one topic (think sportsname.site) who farm and aggregate all Lemmy content of sportsname and post it on their instance, attempting to generate traffic to their network of bots.

Names withheld to protect myself from getting griefed.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (12 children)

I've seen two bot patterns (called out by the users themselves in context) in years of using reddit; both rely on the bot accounts having karma-farmed the system (and these include adding to their karma farm):

  • (a) Repost-bots: they take a good image content post from some time ago which may not have been popular at the time, or posted in a more niche subreddit, and repost it as their own content in a popular subreddit a period of time later, using very specific timing to hit their target audience. Commenters call this out but a lot of folks just click on images and upvote and don't read comments (memes, etc.), so the accounts tend to have longer lifespans.

  • (b) Comment-bots: they are similar to the above, but instead farm good content comments which have low or few upvotes (typically because the comment was posted "too late" in a thread, timing is everything when posting on a massively read thread - first in gets the upvotes so to speak). These get called out as well by other commenters more successfully and people start to block those accounts, so I see the comment farm bot accounts rotate frequently and have short lifespans. You see this in a lot of News articles.

Sorry no examples on hand, but spend enough time and you see the patterns (or, shall I say used to) - I've left Reddit to only one niche hobby now so my experience is out of date by a year or so (i.e. not aware of the "AI bot" revolution patterns). $0.02 hth

Edit: I should note that not all bot accounts are bad, my niche hobby has a subreddit specific bot (think like an IRC channel bot) which farms the upstream vendor content (website, twitter, youtube, etc.) and posts in the subreddit for everyone's benefit. This type of bot is clearly labeled as a bot and approved by the admins of the subreddit, just like iRC.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Suggestion: start learning git by using your $HOME config files as the first thing you learn how to manage; mentally easy to understand, low friction and just basic git commands needed. One of the most popular repo names we all use is dotfiles so you have plenty of examples to learn from: https://codeberg.org/explore/repos?q=dotfiles

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (3 children)

If you own a domain, hosting Forgejo on a $5 Debian cloud server works perfectly for your personal use case. My site admin panel shows it's using 75MB of actual RAM (not allocated/virtual), it's truly very lightweight. Disk use is very low, just however big your git repos actually are is the key.

The internal SQlite database option is just fine, don't need to bother with PostgreSQL if you're only doing it for yourself (the DB only holds referential info, the actual git data is stored on disk in normal git directories). There's a built in backup command so you can build a simple shell script to run the dump command periodically and back up the entire thing to a tarball.

re: Codeberg, the only "downside" (not really) is they are for FOSS licensed projects only and frown upon using their service for your personal private non FOSS needs (they're not draconian about it, but it's part of the ethos the service is for FOSS licensed projects to use).

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago

To wit: PipePipe is the only one that works for me now to get past the "log in to confirm you're not a bot" viewing any video. Recent PP releases allow you to log into your YT account (which will also solve this age problem), my ISP uses CGNAT and my IP is shared by millions and changes frequently triggering the YT bot filter for every video. :-/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Your favorite search engine -> "bless your heart meaning" and good luck navigating the waters.