this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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Privacy
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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.