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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.
Maybe your instance is federating with someone new that does a lot of bot posting? Sometimes all it takes is one person on the instance to join a very active bot community and next thing you know members are seeing a ton of new bot posts.
Editing to add- On Lemmy you can turn off viewing bot accounts completely in your account settings if you don't ever want to see them.
Re turning off bot accounts, keep in mind labeled bots probably serve a specific purpose. So turning off bots can result in a poorer user experience.
For example I have bot accounts that post weekly discussion threads for TV shows or discussion threads for films.
If you turn off all bots then you'll never see these discussion threads. (I've seen this happen, users starting a duplicate discussion thread because they hid all bot accounts.)
I would recommend blocking bot accounts you find annoying vs blocking all bots.
This is an excellent point. Thanks for taking the time to add this!
any public space that intermediates people attention is eventually going to be spam by bots, proportionally to the number of people present. Lemmy doesn't do much to avoid this. The public internet has no future and the fediverse should be building tools for federated community spaces rather than public spaces shaped in the image of attention-harvesting machines.
I just have bots disabled on my account. I suggest you try that too
Only works with honest bots though
Which, funnily, are probably the bots you'd be fine seeing.
Yup, that was my point
It could be instance-dependent. Do you have any example screenshots?
If there's one or two prolific posters you keep seeing and it's annoying to you, you can block them. If it's certain communities you can curate that for yourself too.
You can also "block all bots" (but the bot flag is generally self-reported). If you think that a bot is not reporting itself correctly (and it's not just a terminally online lemmy user) then you can report them to that instance.
I was just scrolling and saw bot after bot. All with different names. I just when ahead and blocked all bots
Scrolling in what? All? I try to keep my subscriptions curated so I don't really see a lot of the bot communities, without needing to blanket block bots.
I think they were always there, it's that organic posts have gone down since the election is over and the ratio had changed.
do you have examples of these bot posts? i don't think i've ever seen one.
On here? I haven't noticed, but with the lax admission procedures on some instances spammers, scammers and bots are kind of inevitable.
In the really long term you'll probably need an email address that needs a phone number that needs a physical address like everything else.
I don't think people on Lemmy are too keen on requiring phone numbers... cuz privacy reasons...
Yeah, I'd much prefer micropayments in crypto (I swear that's not just a string of buzzwords). HTTP even has codes built in for it, it just never took off because crypto and even paypal didn't exist yet back then.
If you have nothing you, you get a dead internet space. There's simply no reason for the mentioned people to not make endless sockpuppet accounts. That's why the meatspace -> phone -> email chain arose in the first place, without anyone ever designing it as far as I'm aware.
The lemmy_news@lemmy.wtf bot is pretty prolific, but it seems to be a little tamer than its predecessor. It was originally on infosec.pub, but the admin there, Jerry banned it.
I see Zippybot quite a lot as well. And then there is the rss feeder bot, but after blocking all of the communities from that instance I hardly, if ever see it.
