Ask Lemmy

Welcome to the Fediverse, we have an abundance of autism.

There are definitely bots, but I would treat everyone as human until proven otherwise. It's one of the least botted out places, so enjoy the relative peace and quiet.

Every account on ~~reddit~~ fediverse is a bot except you.

Jokes aside, I haven't noticed anything. I don't really see what would anyone gain by setting up bots posing as real humans. Especially on Fediverse. I'm not saying it's never happening but I don't think it's very common.

Not the vibe I’ve gotten. I do get that vibe over on Reddit. I think the quirky conversations and novel responses make me lean away from bot. However I’m not an expert.

Why hello!

I can see from your post that you like losing it; that's great, it's something we have in common!
Have you considered using Mountain Dew? It helps me making losing it even better! Maybe it can help you too. Give it a try!

it seems such a stupid waste of my time and I’m afraid I might just end up blocking real people who happen to express themselves in a strange way

I definitely get accused of being a bot a lot, I'm just like this

Personally, I subscribe to "Live Internet Theory." I assume that the vast majority of people I interact with are real people, and bots are very much an exception, and often easy to identify.

The Internet connects people with different views who wouldn't otherwise meet and who might not express their opinions if they did. Most of the time when I see people lob accusations of being a bot at someone, it's either because their worldview is too limited to imagine a person thinking differently from them, or they just want to use the accusation as an excuse to write them off. The reality is, I think most people who post like expressing themselves through posts, and rather than go through a bot and posting that, they just wouldn't post.

Maybe I err too much on the side of assuming people are human, but I'd rather do that than assume a human is a bot. Especially because I find the biggest "Dead Internet Theory" types tend to be insufferably unimaginative and close-minded, and I don't want to be like them.

Your explanation of why you think some users are bots is too vague. I myself was accused of being a bot once

As an AI language model, I'm unable to address your concerns.

welcome to the beginning of the dead internet. i wonder if it will outlive humanity, bots tweeting at eachother and posting nonsense generated cat food recipes for nobody

If it reassures you, I personally haven't perceived too much bot activity here, at least not compared to Reddit. Either they're much stealthier here, or they're not here in much force.

Something I've seen on Reddit several times now, but not here, is obvious bot vote manipulation. I.e. you would go to, for example, a subreddit of a niche music artist, a newish account will make a post linking to some really obvious scam merchandise site for that artist, it would be replied to by several collaborating new bot accounts expressing desire for said merchandise and they'd all be upvoted, and regular users calling out the scam or bot activity get massively downvoted. Eventually it gets deleted by a human moderator. Not seen anything like that here.

I'd imagine Lemmy is less vulnerable since it's small, bot makers will gain more for targeting bigger sites like Reddit, and I hope if it got bigger here the decentralised setup would give ways to defend against it, like defederating instances (temporarily if appropriate) that have been compromised by a lot of bots.

I've noticed a lot of weird comments taking extremely obvious jokes entirely literally but as the others have said there's an abundance of autists here so it's hard to say.

People on here are not subject to algorithms. There is no algorithmic manipulation to some sort of hive mind. Oh. And some use LLMs to translate their posts.

You should also consider what instance the user is from and whether that instance has a proper sign up application or not.

For instance I feel fairly confident that almost all users on Feddit.dk are real people because we vet every single applicant.

There are a lot of AI slop applications though so if other instances aren't as vigilant, I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of bots.

I came here specifically to get away from the chatbot daycare hellhole that reddit became. Share some of your insights about these accounts and I'll tell you a little about why reddit got so bad. Fediverse doesn't really offer the same kind of incentive to somebody who's trying to train an LLM on comments but who knows.

On reddit, the biggest incentive for people to want to train LLM's is just the sheer amount of data there. Reddit is insanely big and the karma system is basically a "weight" value similar to how neural networks already categorize info. Even if somebody notices the obvious bot account, enough people there will still interact with the bot sincerely that it gets the interaction it's trying to provoke every time.

Also it's easy as hell to set one up to run on reddit. Simply verify an email address, subscribe to r/newtoreddit and and bunch of other subs that don't require karma to comment, and then only give votes for the first month before finally starting to leave comments. Reddit claims to screen for bot accounts but deviating from this specific pattern of conduct is something that gets new users comments flagged for review. Reddit is actually only screening real people.

If you want to talk real tinfoil hat shit, this is probably by design. Chatbots drive up traffic and interaction not just with eachother but specifically with the humans that will also severely inflate usage statistics to look good to advertisers. the ones who leave comments following common "redditisms" and patterns of discussion over and over and over and never get sick of saying the same things.

Basically, I'm hoping none of these conditions exist here. So far doesn't seem like it since fediverse isn't hiding ads as posts, blocking VPN users, or taking such a heavy handed involvement in moderation.

I think the trap is that you should look for accounts that seem extra normal. Those are your typical bot accounts. Impeccable spelling, and more elaborate structure than you'd typically find in a social media comment, but very "locally plausible" content.

In my experience accounts that seem weird are run by weird humans.