this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

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I have the application process enabled for people to join my instance, and I've gotten about 20 bots trying to join today when I had nobody trying to join for 5 days. I can tell because they are generic messages and I put a question in asking what 2+3 is and none of them have answered it at all, they just have a generic message.

Be careful out there, for all you small instance admins.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (18 children)

Why are these bot operators going through the hassle of joining existing instances... couldn't they just set up their own, since instances would need to manually defederate them after they spam?

I wonder how difficult it would be to take a Formspree-style approach to combat the bots, using a hidden form field

[–] fperson 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why are these bot operators going through the hassle of joining existing instances

I wonder if there's already a "the bots are from Reddit" conspiracy :D

I really see no point in these actions. I mean, seriously, why would you want to just harm something open?

[–] dot20 2 points 1 year ago

For the same reasons you'd want to harm any other platform.

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