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.

Internet is not a place for public discourse, it never was. it’s the game of numbers where people brigade discussions and make it confirm to their biases.

Post something bad about the US with facts and statistics in US centric reddit sub, youtube video or article, and see how it divulges into brigading, name calling and racism. Do that on lemmy.ml to call out china/russia. Go to youtube videos with anything critical about India.

For all countries with massive population on the internet, you’re going to get bombarded with lies, delfection, whataboutism and strawman. Add in a few bots and you shape the narrative.

There’s also burying bad press with literally downvoting and never interacting.

Both are easy on the internet when you’ve got the brainwashed gullible mass to steer the narrative.

As others said you can’t prevent them completely. Only partially. You do it four steps:

1. Make it unattractive for bots.
2. Prevent them from joining.
3. Prevent them from posting/commenting.
4. Detect them and kick them out.

The sad part is that, if you go too hard with bot eradication, it’ll eventually inconvenience real people too. (Cue to Captcha. That shit is great against bots, but it’s cancer if you’re a human.) Or it’ll be laborious/expensive and not scale well. (Cue to “why do you want to join our instance?”).

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.

Is this a problem here? One thing we should also avoid is letting paranoia divide the community. It’s very easy to take something like this and then assume everyone you disagree with must be some kind of bot, which itself is damaging.

By being small and unimportant

Negative Karma on a post means people cared enough about your writing to downvote it.

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

I think the larger problem is that we are now trying to be non-controversal to avoid downvotes.

Who thinks it’s a good idea to self censor on social media? Because that’s what you are doing, because of the downvote system.

I will never agree downvotes are a net positive. They create censorship and allows the ignorant mob or bots to push down things they don’t like reading.

Bots make it worse of course, since they can just downvote whatever they are programmed to downvote, and upvote things that they want to be visible. Basically it’s like having an army of minions to manipulate entire platforms.

All because of downvotes and upvotes. Of course there should be a way to express that you agree or disagree but should that affect visibility directly? I don’t think so.

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.

You don’t.

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

Long before cryptocurrencies existed, proof-of-work was already being used to hinder bots. For every post, vote, etc., a cryptographic task has to be solved by the device used for it. Imperceptibly fast for the normal user, but for a bot trying to perform hundreds or thousands of actions in a row, a really annoying speed bump.

See e.g. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

This combined with more classic blockades such as CAPTCHAs (especially image recognition, which is still expensive in mass despite the advances in AI) should at least represent a first major obstacle.

You can’t get rid of bots, nor spammers. The only thing is that you can have a more aggressive automated punishment system, which will unevitably also punish good users, along with the bad users.

One argument in favor of bots on social media is their ability to automate routine tasks and provide instant responses. For example, bots can handle customer service inquiries, offer real-time updates, and manage repetitive interactions, which can enhance user experience and free up human moderators for more complex tasks. Additionally, they can help in disseminating important information quickly and efficiently, especially in emergency situations or for public awareness campaigns.

Signup safeguards will never be enough because the people who create these accounts have demonstrated that they are more than willing to do that dirty work themselves.

Let’s look at the anatomy of the average Reddit bot account:

1. Rapid points acquisition. These are usually new accounts, but it doesn’t have to be. These posts and comments are often done manually by the seller if the account is being sold at a significant premium.

2. A sudden shift in contribution style, usually preceded by a gap in activity. The account has now been fully matured to the desired amount of points, and is pending sale or set aside to be “aged”. If the seller hasn’t loaded on any points, the account is much cheaper but the activity gap still exists.

• When the end buyer receives the account, they probably won’t be posting anything related to what the seller was originally involved in as they set about their own mission unless they’re extremely invested in the account. It becomes much easier to stay active in old forums if the account is now AI-controlled, but the account suddenly ceases making image contributions and mostly sticks to comments instead. Either way, the new account owner is probably accumulating much less points than the account was before.
• A buyer may attempt to hide this obvious shift in contribution style by deleting all the activity before the account came into their possession, but now they have months of inactivity leading up to the beginning of the accounts contributions and thousands of points unaccounted for.

3. Limited forum diversity. Fortunately, platforms like this have a major advantage over platforms like Facebook and Twitter because propaganda bots there can post on their own pages and gain exposure with hashtags without having to interact with other users or separate forums. On Lemmy, programming an effective bot means that it has to interact with a separate forum to achieve meaningful outreach, and these forums probably have to be manually programmed in. When a bot has one sole objective with a specific topic in mind, it makes great and telling use of a very narrow swath of forums. This makes Platforms like Reddit and Lemmy less preferred for automated propaganda bot activity, and more preferred for OnlyFans sellers, undercover small business advertisers, and scammers who do most of the legwork of posting and commenting themselves.

My solution? Implement a weighted visual timeline for a user’s points and posts to make it easier for admins to single out accounts that have already been found to be acting suspiciously. There are other types of malicious accounts that can be troublesome such as self-run engagement farms which express consistent front page contributions featuring their own political or whatever lean, but the type first described is a major player in Reddit’s current shitshow and is much easier to identify.

Most important is moderator and admin willingness to act. Many subreddit moderators on Reddit already know their subreddit has a bot problem but choose to do nothing because it drives traffic. Others are just burnt out and rarely even lift a finger to answer modmail, doing the bare minimum to keep their subreddit from being banned.