People skeeting stuff.
Bluesky Social is a microblogging social platform being developed in conjunction with the decentralized AT Protocol. Previously invite-only, the flagship Beta app went public in February 2024. All are welcome!
Some of those followers are simply looking for business ops with you
Saw this today on there, apparently "follow farming" is going to be a thing as long as this 3rd party app doing autofollows of people who follow other accounts exists. Generally I'm going to treat random followers as influence operation peddling bots until I start posting on my account.
Right now I'm finding accounts that I like to read and trying to build up a base of people to see if I can create a worthwhile feed. Still not a proof-of-concept use case for doing Bluesky long term but potentially will be interesting enough to stick around in a couple weeks. I can't imagine the awful user experience for people who are just rawdogging it though.
I get a lot of people following me fishing for me to follow back. And a lot of people follow me and all they do is post links to their gofund me and tell some story about being poor in Africa or living in Gaza. I block em. I don't want accounts following 16k+ to spam follow me
Lol oh boy that site sounds so great
I think that's just social media now. I'm still on fb for some reason and the vast majority of the promoted accounts seem fake, and I get followed by porn and crypto bots there. Lemmy is smaller so it's more like drinking from a stream than a river but still a few creeps, trolls and bots here but a lot less.
Seeing Bluesky makes me appreciate Lemmy more, even if it can get echoey sometimes.
I'm a nobody so out of the 500 followers I have I'd say half are OnlyFans accounts mass following.
Huh. Took me 6mos to get to 32 followers. 🤷♂️
Following someone seems to trigger it, at least for me. I don’t know if that’s an aliveness trigger the bots can see or if immediate selling is a monetizing thing.
Or maybe I’m overthinking it with a new account, newly following people, newly being discovered by bots
Interested in your thoughts even if they aren’t directly applicable to my experience.
I tried out Mastodon, bc I'm a fan of the Fediverse. There's only 1 person on Mastodon who I really want to follow, a researcher who's respected in their field but not hugely famous.
So I made an account on a smaller mastodon server and followed them, no problem. After I looked around a while I realized I kind of wanted to be on a larger server though, so I made an account on a larger mastodon server and tried to follow them... but even though I clicked "Follow", it wouldn't list them as someone I follow, and it wouldn't show me their posts when they made new ones.
I'm still not sure wtf is going on... but my current conjecture (based on a couple web searches) is: apparently you can control who follows you, right? I think there is some setting where if you select it, nobody can follow you unless you approve them? So I think the person I want to follow probably just automatically approved my first follow request, but not my second? I dunno, I don't put profile pics or write a bio or anything so maybe my account just looks like a bot account?
So I thought: I'll just message the person I want to follow, and tell them hey I met you at such-and-such conference I'm trying to follow you pliz let me. But I read on the web that you must never do that. You must never message someone asking them to let you follow them.
Anyway, I rarely sign on to Mastodon, and possibly people there think I'm a bot, I dunno.
Crypto. Started immediately.