Ask Lemmy

Bots are easier to test on smaller platforms. Lemmy also has a lot of extremists that than be easily tricked to blindly believing the bot because they agree with the machine propaganda.

Bots are rampant, you just need ti pay attention.

They exist on Lemmy. If they are labeled and serve a useful function they are generally not a problem. I find people with Alts or those that use AI to respond to people more annoying honestly.

I think other posters note that Lemmy is not a major target due to low user count and decentralized nature.

There is far more to gain making bots on larger corporate social media networks, lemmy/the fediverse is by no means immune but it is a waste of time for the vast majority of people that would specialize in that kind of thing.

You get the most power/profit potential from controlling a social network by creating the biggest lightbulbs possible (influencers) and attracting as many moths (users) to the smallest number of super lightbulbs as you can because it makes manipulating narratives and pushing high value ads easier. For the same reason this is the most lucrative environment to flood with bots.

Corporate social media optimizes for creating these leverage points, the fediverse on the otherhand is if anything loosely alligned against those kinds of extreme concentrations of popularity and social capital. Why bother gaming the fediverse then?

It's on the internet, so I assume at least four out of every three posts are bots trying to sell me something or to get me to hate someone. 🤷‍♂️

Lemmy does not have any kind of builtin "safeguards" against bots or scrapers (other than during registration, but I wouldn't call them safeguards). Some instances do use tools to slow them down or block them, such as Cloudflare or self hosted proof of work CAPTCHAs (for example Anubis, the anime girl).

While I can't say that bots are common in Lemmy, I do see a few of them in this comm and ban them every once in a while.

TL;DR: no builtin safeguards in lemmy against scrapers.

only email verification, captcha and manual approval against bots during registration

edit: clarified a few things

They're around but not nearly as bad as they are on sites like Reddit, Facebook, X, etc. They are also usually called out when someone is trying to circumvent the bot tag. It probably helps that Lemmy is much smaller, so there's less incentive to send spambots to something like Lemmy compared to larger places.

That said, asudox is right in that there aren't really any built in safeguards either, it's pretty much up to the admins and/or mods to stop them.

i can't really tell the difference between bots and idiots who are pushing an agenda/astroturfing. is there really functionally any difference for the end user?

it's quite different from the perceptive of an admin, for sure.

Everyone is a boy except for you.

I think you're the only one beyond the rss and repost bots

Prevalent but not nearly to the extent of corporate social media.

The bots¹ I noticed are all posts, no comments. Mostly memes, or comics, or YSK, or similar. New account, less than 7 days. Their posts aways get on front page sorted by All/Top-Day.

¹Suspected bots, no clue if they are bots. But given that 90-9-1 rule, comments should be higher than posts imo, like why post stuff if you just never engage in comments, weirdo. 20 posts in political stuff and 0 comments is sus as hell.

Anyways, maybe we need to return to Ham Radios lol. Try botting thats shit.

They exist but they're supposed to be labeled. There's an account setting to mark an account as a bot. Anyone deploying them in good faith should be flagging them appropriately.

I have maybe 5 users tagged as Russian bots, whether or not they are is debatable but they don't seem to comment on or post anything but Russian State propaganda.

Labeled bots that just post content?

There was/is some but I blocked them long ago.

Bots pretending to be humans in the comment section?

Nothing believable, it works on reddit because most posts are reposts so the bots just recreate the old comment chain. It looks like an authentic human conversation because it was. But even on reddit I doubt there are many bots who can respond logically and not just recycle whatever got up voted last time. Because the boys are also up voting each other and reinforcing it

That's "dead internet" once the bots are more active and outweigh humans on the algorithm, it doesn't matter what people like, just who paid the most for bots.

Then the internet becomes a giant waste of electricity that people just stop using.

Most of the bots you'll see are rss feed and copypaste posts from reddit. The reddit ones i haven't seen in awhile though.

I'm like totally a bot and stuff.

bots aren't saturating lemmy yet because there are not enough users to automate marketing towards yet. (maybe yes to those special cases where there are big enough communities)

lemmy and fediverse does seem to lack a standard approach to moderation and that includes anti-bot stuff.

I don't think that it's super prevalent. Most are labeled, but the lemmy users seem to really hate bots and report them very quickly, even false positives. Unlabeled bot accounts usually get banned pretty quickly.

I'd like to know the answer to this, too. As far as I can tell so far, the only protection is that lemmy is kinda small and not really appealing to bot on.