Let’s be honest. The fediverse will also have a huge bot problem soon. We kind of have this right now, but if you look a little bit further in the future, when we maybe come a little bit more relevant, spammers and scammers and all those propagandists will also come here. I suspect that they’re already here.
Currently we have no protection at all. You can setup an instance, federate and start with your federated vote manipulation. Our human moderators can’t keep up with bots posting spam to their community and we are totally helpless against LLM bots pushing some agenda.
Yup. Conspiracy theories aside, the bot problem is an actual hard problem to solve.
Agree, hard indeed. Any solution will have problems. False positives. False negatves. Violating privacy.
So far, maybe Lemmy flew under the radar and it’s a nice enough place. But I don’t see how that can continue longterm.
It is sad to me. Anything nice eventually gets ruined.
There’s a boiling point to almost everything, and lemmy trying to be an umbrella of communities rather than topic-specific, good old forums is the crux. When you narrow completely down and focus on one main, maybe 2 adjacent topics, and the rest is piled into off-topic board - it’s stupidly easy to ID bots.
Team Fortress 2 players reliving their PTSD trauma with your comment
we have tools like defederating any instance filled with bots but we definitely need more
How would that help? Bots will just move to another instance. Maybe yours.
I mean it literally helps to defederate an instance overrun by bots because that means no one is taking care of banning them and manually review sign-ups, so you defend your instance of that spam/slop.
The best part is that defederation is not final so when that instance is finally healthy again it can be federated.
I think people here are missing the difference between reddit and any instance on the fediverse. Every instance admin has the power to control their federation and it is in their best interest to review sign-ups to a certain degree. Unlike reddit there is no urge to fill the site with ‘users’ to inflate numbers and sell ads.
I’ve actually been wondering about that - if your site is predominantly there to cash in from ads, but you ban the vast majority of real users and then inject 2/3 of the entire population with bots…who is even left to pump those ad views? Google Ads knows when its a fake view and bots dont scroll through.
Get ready for the tankies and other assholes to scare off all the new users again :D
Usually when people leave reddit, many communists do come and find a much better place here. I think it’s good that we have a lot of left wing people here, and have little tolerance for right-wing and pro-imperialist views.
That’s how practically the entirety of the Internet was before it was monopolized and shoved into apps on smartphones. It was all leftists and hobbyists.
Yep, it’s kinda fun that way.
You mean a place where you can have intelligent discourse without somebody smearing shit all over while parroting Fox News talking points?
I wouldn’t say social media is a good space for intelligent conversations, haha.
Maybe my standards have been lowered by nextdoor. Nobody spelling you “ewe” because they’re using voice to text and not proof reading their brain diarrhea.
That’s fair, haha.
People who are “scared off” by leftwing politics are probably happier elsewhere anyway
Do you prefer hanging out with the reactionaries?
Idk, y’all are not much better than Reddit. Just a different kind of sycophant here.
What are the problems with wanting production and distribution to be collectivized and oriented around needs, rather than profits? How is this comparable to Reddit?
Every time this happens we gain new comrades while filtering out the worst of the insufferable reddit stereotypes to the reddit instances, thus keeping the rest of the fediverse clean. We are like mussel colonies filtering out fedora behavior. You’re welcome.
New user here. Just approved and arrived. Greetings and salutations, folks 🙏🏻
You have to read between the lines. This just gives them the option to label anybody they want as a “bot” with virtually no way to challenge them. They can now ban anybody they wish for posting content they don’t agree with (pro-gaza, anti-israel, anti-capitalist, etc).
They already ban anybody they wish without recourse or actionable means to challenge them.
-Reddit Refuge banned for life for being critical of the fascist state of Israel.
I got banned after 15 years for being pro-choice.
It’s sort of bittersweet (more sweet though, as the past few years the site has just been miserable for me), but I’m sort of proud I went out standing up for women’s rights.
It was a 14 year account when I got banned, so yeah pretty much same sad boat. I do miss certain specialized specific subreddits.
Just to be clear… you think that the thing they’ve been actively doing for years, without any indication that there’s any motivation to change, is why they’re changing policy? 🤔 let’s just say I’m not convinced
They might be wanting to branch out to banning for protected reasons. They would need a handy excuse for that to avoid lawsuits.
I’ve been thinking of creating a new account through Tor, so that I could reconnect with my former communities who are still active there since, unfortunately, Reddit is still bigger than Lemmy. But with this new stupid identity verification rule from Reddit, I don’t think I will come back to the site.
I guess I will recreate the communities I’ve been missing here in Lemmy instead, which I have been thinking of doing for a long while now.
I’ve been thinking of creating a new account through Tor, so that I could reconnect with my former communities who are still active there since
Don’t create an account, use (or host) a Redlib instance, subscribe to your favourite subreddits and then bookmark it afterwards, that’s what I do.
Redlib
Ooo, this is the first I’ve heard of this but it looks really cool and promising! Get all the info and art without all the bots / bad users. I do miss the NIN commenters, but I’m also in their discord and there’s plenty of community to be found there!
Let’s go! We can all make Lemmy better.
I’ve been thinking the same thing, but I don’t even know how to do that
If they get rid of the bots, though, there won’t be any more posts.
The only thing I miss from reddit is my favorite small niche subs.
Invisible bicycles.
Where people take photos of people on bicycles and Photoshop out the bicycle. You can request or do the edits.
Forbiddensnacks
Photos of stuff that looks like delicious food but is not food.
There was another with short videos of animals in sync. Like chickens or dogs .
Oh and another that was photos of cats, sitting on clear glass. The photos were from the underside.
There was another photoshop battle one. Where there was a prompt and then everyone would submit a photoshopped mash of the prompt.
But I bet AI has ruined that one.
What is this. People posted pictures of stuff that the community tried to figure out what it was
Retro futurism. Just posts about that.
I think I miss forbidden snacks the most.
Im also someone with a million hobbies. So I really miss those. Some are here too. Bigger ones like 3d printing and photography but not stained glass. Not sure if there is one for Blender. I should check.
Subs for specific games like remedy games, zelda. Animal crossing.
Honestly I’m from the time where there used to be forums for these things and I liked forums just fine.
I get that smaller population means less niche communities.
I’m okay with it. But I will be honest and say I miss my niche indie subs. I hate that it’s been ruined. And that it’s dead.
Facebook groups still exist though and many are acceptable. Especially for the indie games and hobbies.
my little hometown somehow had a subreddit. i don’t know how
I miss r/fitness. It was big enough but good enough to learn a lot and get motivation.
I miss the TV episode discussions. Even if I wasn’t following live, I could go read the thread and feel the shared excitement and read the theories and there was always something I hadn’t noticed that someone else had.
I miss those the most.
Same. I admit I circled back recently purely for the hype of Hazbin Season 2.
Fortunately, this season was shit so I didn’t spend long on there this time lol
Yeah I also liked the show subs where people theorized and discussed details.
The good news is that if the fediverse gets an influx of Redditors, maybe we’ll see some of those niches pop up here too. Reddit’s impending identity theft coupled with the insane enforcement of rule 1 they’ve been doing lately is what got me to make my account here.
Same style of stuff I miss. Mainly instrument related subreddits, books, and boutique blu-rays. However I don’t miss Reddit itself at all. Especially with how right wing brain rot it became. It felt like hanging out in a Facebook comments section.
Honestly I’m from the time where there used to be forums for these things and I liked forums just fine.
Same. I think it we moved back to forums the internet experience would improve
Agree. Another benefit is, it’s much less productive to use info-warfare bots against a small forum of let’s say 500 users, than against a global site with 1B users.
Yeah I think big hubs are too problematic.
In my infant span of figuring out how to get on here, there are some charms here like foodporn being on the main server, and shittyfoodporn being exclusively on the Canadian one.
Okay that’s pretty funny
I wish there was a more active general gaming community here. I just migrated over from reddit, and haven’t found one that isn’t a ghost town.
Similar vein to forbidden snacks was don’t put your dick in that. Yeah I miss the niche subs too, don’t miss the rest of the bullshit tho.
E. Ask historians was also high grade.
Exactly. For me it was Cats (all animals, really) and Guitars.
Political discussions are far better on Lemmy.
Psst ,we humans left reddit in 2023
Something tells me that won’t end well for them.
Will reveal how much their population is bots.
Do you really think they will out their own astroturfing interests? They will only tell u who is a bit if they didn’t want them in the site, not if they paid to be there !
Though I’m new here, lots of communities rules are copypasta from breddit, so what’s honestly different on here?
We dont want those bots here either
If Reddit loses all the bots, they will literally lose more than half of their activity, especially in an election year.
Sounds like a statement to say they have a hard-on-bots policy, but in practice it seems they won’t care unless there’s significant outcry against a particular account.
literally elon’s twitter strategy
Remember how each time ANY new dating site and later app would actually gain decent traction, the owners would pump it full of fucking bot accounts on top of ignoring scammers making accounts just to milk male purses? Except dating apps have their predations set unlike these melting pots of doom scrolling excuses for forums.
For some reason, most of the responses welcome that decision!? I guess the others were banned.
Spez announces they won’t tolerate competing astroturfing, only shareholder-approved bots will remain.
Jesus this Reddit post reeks of bootlickers. The comments sound sooooo artificial, hard to say if bootlickers or ironically bots programmed to praise and upvote this shitstorm.
I was scrolling down to find the obligatory “Fuck Spez” comments but got disappointed. Probably moderated heavily.
