Am I just noticing them more now? It’s like every other post now is a bot. Please don’t tell me that lemmy is about to be like reddit where it’s only bots that post anything at all
Am I just noticing them more now? It’s like every other post now is a bot. Please don’t tell me that lemmy is about to be like reddit where it’s only bots that post anything at all
Bots on Lemmy have to be clearly marked as a bot, or get banned.
Most of the major instances have manual approval so bots are very unlikely to get through.
If you are wondering if a user is secrely a bot, just check the sign up page of their instance, if it requires an application, its probably not a bot.
Edit: Unless you suspect the instance admin to be in kahoots with the bots.
What would stop a human from creating an account, then having a bot run it?
It makes it harder.
You can have hundreds of bots on reddit in an hour, and because Reddit is so mainstream, its easy for bots to blend in the millions of accounts out there.
On lemmy, applications often ask things like: Why did you decide to join lemmy?
But some ask harder questions like on lemmy.dbzer0.com it asks “Who is your favorite pirate, anarchist, or open source advocate” and “Write about a recent event in the past month”.
I mean its not hard to write about this, but you have to make each account have a unique paragraph or you get sussed and denied.
So you can probably get a dozen account approved in an hour, but not like 900 accounts.
If your bot network starts to form a pattern, admins can get suspicious and ban you.
And if bots become a threat, admins can make the application questions more complex. Requiring you to spend more time to fill the application for each account.
Nothing is foulproof, is it makes it harder.
Like even if bots aren’t an issue, there are still humans that operate sockpuppet accounts to push propaganda, and these aren’t technically “bots” but a human with a network of sockpuppets can still be as dangerous as a bot network.