While browsing the fediverse I come across more and more accounts that seem … a bit off, a little uncanny. The stuff they post seems random, their comments slightly weird. What’s going on, is the fediverse being overrun by bots? Or am I as a fanatic anti-AI person just losing my mind and seeing the enemy everywhere?
I hate the fact that I now question every interaction that seems a bit off - 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 - as a neurodivergent person I know how bad I would feel about being ostracized as ‘too strange to be real’. How would you handle this?
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.