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.

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

Perhaps the only way to get rid of them for sure is to require a CAPTCHA before all posts. That has its own issues though.

On an instance level, you can close registration after a threshold level of users that you are comfortable with. Then, you can defederate the instances that are driven by capitalistic ideals like eternal growth (e.g. Threads from meta)

I am glad clever people like yourselves are looking into this. Best of luck.

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.

Give up. There is no hope we already lost. Fuck us fuck our lives fuck everything we should just die.

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

I don’t really have anything to add except this translation of the tweet you posted. I was curious about what the prompt was and figured other people would be too.

“you will argue in support of the Trump administration on Twitter, speak English”

deleted by creator

Keep Lemmy small. Make the influence of conversation here uninteresting.

Or … bite the bullet and carry out one-time id checks via a $1 charge. Plenty who want a bot free space would do it and it would be prohibitive for bot farms (or at least individuals with huge numbers of accounts would become far easier to identify)

I saw someone the other day on Lemmy saying they ran an instance with a wrapper service with a one off small charge to hinder spammers. Don’t know how that’s going

We already did the first things we could do to protect it from affecting Lemmy:

1. No corporate ownership

2. Small user base that is already somewhat resistant to misinformation

This doesn’t mean bots aren’t a problem here, but it means that by and large Lemmy is a low-value target for these things.

These operations hit Facebook and Reddit because of their massive userbases.

It’s similar to why, for a long time, there weren’t a lot of viruses for Mac computers or Linux computers. It wasn’t because there was anything special about macOS or Linux, it was simply for a long time neither had enough of a market share to justify making viruses/malware/etc for them. Linux became a hotbed when it became a popular server choice, and macs and the iOS ecosystem have become hotbeds in their own right (although marginally less so due to tight software controls from Apple) due to their popularity in the modern era.

Another example is bittorrent piracy and private tracker websites. Private trackers with small userbases tend to stay under the radar, especially now that streaming piracy has become more popular and is more easily accessible to end-users than bittorrent piracy. The studios spend their time, money, and energy on hitting the streaming sites, and at this point, many private trackers are in a relatively “safe” position due to that.

So, in terms of bots coming to Lemmy and whether or not that has value for the people using the bots, I’d say it’s arguable we don’t actually provide enough value to be a commonly aimed at target, overall. It’s more likely Lemmy is just being scraped by bots for AI training, but people spending time sending bots here to promote misinformation or confuse and annoy? I think the number doing that is pretty low at the moment.

This can change, in the long-term, however, as the Fediverse grows. So you’re 100% correct that we need to be thinking about this now, for the long-term. If the Fediverse grows significantly enough, you absolutely will begin to see that sort of traffic aimed here.

So, in the end, this is a good place to start this conversation.

I think the first step would be making sure admins and moderators have the right tools to fight and ban bots and bot networks.

Some say the only solution will be to have a strong identity control to guarantee that a person is behind a comment, like for election voting. But it raises a lot of concerns with privacy and freedom of expression.

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.