this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2024
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Technology
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Absolutely incredible breakdown of the problem. In addition to twitter, I strongly suspect Reddit is infested with a similar increase in bot accounts, which would explain how a sub I used to moderate there has some of the highest page visits its ever had, yet its actual user engagement hasn't changed at all, or even gone down.
Corporate websites, who have a financial incentive to allow the bots, have become completely unusable. The difference in interaction on Lemmy is incredibly stark, which goes to show that the fediverse seems to be far more resilient against bots since we can defederate from an instance that gets taken over, like cutting off an infected limb to stop the spread.
Hopefully, but I worry no small part of it at the moment is just that we’re too small to be worth the bother. If the fediverse grows big enough to matter, well I worry about what dedicated teams of people working a full time job could do. One or two people can easily run a few dozen active accounts, which in turn could easily dominate conversation on an instance.
Hmm... That could be an issue, you're right.
If it does get that bad, we'd gave to act more defensively by only federating with instances that have reviewed sign-ups and have received an endorsement on fediseer.
That would result in a more isolated experience, but if that's the only way to combat it, then we'll have to shift with the needs of the moment to keep it mostly humans we're interacting with, and to make the moderation workload manageable.
It has started already and its coming from lemmy.ml, you can check how news-related posts align with this admin's (davel) profile, if you post anything contrary to it, you'll notice a lot more downvote than news-related communities outside lemmy.ml
Here's some sample of what he spreads:
https://midwest.social/post/19339660/13589968 Under replies
His profile is full of Chinese and Russian propaganda