this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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The question is: what percentage of those users are bots? And does it matter?
The way I've heard of things in federated instances, if one instance becomes bot filled and toxic, then other instances will unfederate them. It makes it worthwhile for mods of that instance to run a healthy server.
There's a bot running on one instance now that identifies itself as such and is reposting content from reddit with links going to the original article. These sorts of bots I can accept.
We really need some better moderating tools between instances. At this point, the only solution is defederation, but that's really not a good solution.
Maybe some kind of way to restrict, but not eliminate, users between federations? Some age that accounts from instance A have to reach to post/comment in instance B? Maybe, communities that are restricted by instance? We'd have to be careful of it not getting too complicated and driving away users.
It matters because it means which Lemmy is growing exponentially! Ofc some of those users would be bots, but I highly doubt a lot of them.
There are instances with over 9k accounts and like 5 posts. There's a lot of bots.
Hope the staff works to solve this.
The problem is that there is no "the staff" as such. The developers can add tools, but if people want bot instances, there will be bot instances. The instance administrators can just not federate with them (which makes the most sense to me) but that will be on an instance by instance basis.
I understand, thank you. Then of that way how possible avoid that Lemmy.world for example would filled with bots.
Well Lemmy.worlsld can defederate with the bit instances. That won't affect any other instance though.
As far as bots making accounts on Lemmy.world, they've added a captcha which helps a lot.
I hope we'll get some improved moderating tools that help eventually as well.
I hope so.
The reason it is likely a lot of bot accounts is someone explained how to exploit a glitch that creates thousands of bot accounts within minutes. The day after they posted the exploit, suddenly Lemmy started growing rapidly. It’s just too coincidental to not be mostly bots