this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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Bots have inflated the total users count (around 2.4 million), but they aren't active (yet). So for now active users is a recommended way to measure the fediverse. But once bots start posting, we'll have to find another way to track real user activity.
This is just really disappointing and gross. Is there any way to not have bots absolutely everywhere?
Yeah, it's absolutely disappointing and gross. Bots have been actively probing for obscure instances without registration validation and flocking to them. Good thing the top real lemmy instances (like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, sh.itjust.works, lemmy.ca) have been much more vigilant about that.
What's your take on it?
My (different person here) take is it's probing behavior. Who benefits? Anti-reddit-protest trolls want to see this fail, and some could have the resources. Savvy criminal organizations see potential profit. Major tech companies see at least a research opportunity at minimal expense. White hats want to find and raise awareness of vulnerabilities.
Only governments would really have no major motive beyond the usual surveillance of a social space. So I think the question should really be, who's not doing it? Because if people aren't wholesale fucking around yet, they'll start very soon. It's only the savvy or lucky that are aware of us still, but that will not be true for long. Snowball is rolling now, that's pretty plain to see.
I mean, we're just a big and growing pile of consumers. What else do you do with those?
Are those instances defederating from the bot-filled ones?
Yeah, those instances are defederating from the bot-filled ones, but new ones are still popping up (although seems to be slowing down a little for now).
I hope there's some way to block that, bots are useful or funny sometimes (like the ones to download videos, reminders, etc). But I asume most of them have the sole purpose of advertising or brigading.
I can't wrap my head about Lemmy 0.18 dropping capchas.
Which is a shame, because in theory it seems like creating a self-hosted instance for your personal account has a lot of advantages (not worrying about the host doing something screwy or abandoning the instance, having full control over who you federate with, being able to customize the interface, etc.)
But that may end up going the way of self-hosted email servers, where differentiating yourself from a spam server becomes impossible and everyone ends up on the equivalent of gmail.
If we have the ability to identify them or where they're coming from, could our various platforms just defederate or block the ones who aren't dealing with the bot problem down the line?
I don't see how that could be done, the bot owners can always just spin up their own new instance where they control sign up requirements.
Other instances can then defederate from the spam instance but they can quickly spin up a new one.
Gonna be interesting to see how it's solved.
This is going to be the real skynet fight.
Require that membership in the Fediverse be approved?
The fediverse is decentralized, anyone can start their own lemmy/kbin/mastodon/whatever server and make an account they just approve themselves.
If you mean some kind of global approval then that destroys the whole point of the fediverse.
Just throwing out ideas.
If the Fediverse cannot control the bots then where does that leave actual users?
wait how did we conclude that the bots aren't active yet?
Because people have been monitoring bot infected instances and have not seen them post or comment (yet).