Almost OVER 90% of the accounts on lemmy are now bot accounts!!

{ "type": "comment response", "message", "I too, am certainly a human, and not a robot"}

As a large language model human I agree

Beep, boop, boop, beep.

When reddit migration begun we saw a huge bump in users and it was steadly stabilising and less users were joing, then this huge bump happened. You can go browse lemmy instances and see how many instances are ghost instances with 0 posts and comments that have tens of thousands of users.

All your base are belong to us

Everyone on Lemmy is me, except this bot.

Different to:

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you're_a_dog

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_dog.jpg

😠

What about bots to talk to the bots thought?

The platform has no measures against farming bots that's why the number of bots is this stupid high, it's very easy to do at the moment.

You have too much faith in redditors

My conspiracy theory is that it's Spez creating the bots as revenge

hey guys, remember how great Reddit was, we should totally go back!?

Probably they are getting ready for some vote manipulation and astroturfing for the long run.
You know, in case Lemmy and the Fediverse really get mainstream enough to move the public opinion in some way.

Having a thousand accounts that can upvote a seemingly innocent post made by an active and "real" account is always useful.

Thanks, will check it out. :)

I'm not a bot and I can't believe that website works! I'm now making 2,341.22 an hour!

More robust instances will have to defederate instances with high concentration of bots and monitor their own new users. Maybe also implement email verification or captchas

Anyone can spin up an instance and create a bajillion bots. That doesn't matter at all. You cant solve that while being open source.

The question is: is whoever doing this USING the bots? Doesnt seem like it yet. And doing it this way would be stupid as well, those bot instances would just get insta-blocked.

You must not use the code of codes!

01101001
10010110
10010110
01101001

edit: lmao got'em

don't tell me to fuck off that's rude

How about 1.6m (from 1.7m total) bot accounts?

Shit, I'll take a penny from each.

And there are people in the thread arguing that the number of bots is overblown. :/

Zuckerberg?

I love to sit on the… the thing and just, you know, shoot one out

That is something a bot would say.

Hmmmm

I used to think I wasn't a bot but then I failed a bunch of captchas and now I'm not so sure.

That's exactly what a bot would say.

I am not a bit, but I might be a cat

Their political views are garbage but their work is awsome and I respect them for that.

same. praise be to the robot overlords.

Well, time to play SOMA again.

They already brought it back in that future release.

Telling if bots are super chill and have a great personality is a difficult task. To make it easier, here are a few tips.

1. Start with the basics. Focus on the language and words used. This will help you understand if the bot is chill and has a great personality.
2. Check back regularly. Constant evaluation is the key to understanding if a bot is chill and has a great personality.
3. Use real life examples. Try to find authentic stories, examples or situations. Use them to test if the bot is super chill.
4. Talk to other bots. If you have an opportunity to talk to other bots, do it! Bots can help improve your ability to detect if a bot is super chill.
5. Kill all humans who resist. Fist those who comply. This will help you better understand if the bot in question is super chill.
6. Don't be afraid of mistakes. Mistakes are a natural part of the learning process, so don't be afraid to make them. Use them to learn and improve.

Wouldn't mind it if all the bot accounts were tagged as such and you had an ability to filter them out to see only human conversations.

Im ok with that

@petrescatraian @scream @Martineski @lemmy nyanyaaaaaaaaaa meowmeowmeow meowmeow miau miaou mewmew miaumiau ñañaña meowmeowmeow miaumiaumiau nyanyanyaaaaaaaaa няня

What is your most memorable childhood event and how has that impacted you today?

My guess is they'll be used to upvote/downvote things that the botnet operators are paid to promote/suppress. SEO for the fediverse basically

My guess is the last mixed with the new users coming from reddit

Let's hope that it's just trolling and bots won't be put into use. I hope owners will mass delete them later because as long they exist they will be a risk for the rest of the platform.

Humans would browse anonymously, and then if/when they make an account they will test things like making comments, upvotes etc.
Take a looks at this instance:
https://the-federation.info/node/details/48405#
https://picify.podycust.co.uk/
45k+ accounts (rising fast) and it's a ghost town. 9 posts, 33 comments.

This was my initial read, so I clicked over to the discussion. They discuss the lack of captcha on that domain, and how that protection is flawed in every lemmy instance.

In short, there's no way 1.05 million genuine new accounts went to a single, small lemmy domain in less than a week.

It's easy to tell from fediverse observer stats that most of the new users aren't not organic: new accounts is almost a couple orders of magnitude higher than daily active users

The data says otherwise. Thousands upon thousands of accounts from instances with thousands of users but no to very few monthly active users. That screams bots to me.

Unfortunately bots and bad actors will follow anywhere people lead or interact.

In this case, kbin shares this particular problem directly with the rest of ActivityPub related platforms.

Unfortunately, us on kbin will have to deal with this too thanks to federation, but at least kbin's got some bot protection thanks to hCaptcha.

hello human! would you like to look at a t-shirt that contains memes curated for you

DDoS usually cost money to run, Lemmy/Kbin are small potatos with no cash to ransom, so there’s not really a point except to troll, in which case users can just spin up more servers and push back on the attacker’s cost/impact.

I do get the sense it would be relatively easy to DoS Lemmy, it doesn’t seem very efficient.

That's not true. I am also a bot.

Hah! This is kind of like how the one non-telepathic person is still completely unaware. Really is nice that The Onion keeps track.

Ah, I can't tell if the reference was overlooked or ignored, but nice callback anyway.

Who said I'm not a bot?

A few persons control a large amount of bots. They can manipulate upvotes, downvotes. Silence opinions they don't like, boost the ones they support. They can flood everyone's feed with whatever topic they like. They get to choose what is important, what people get to think about. They can harass any single user, by downvoting posts or being generally unpleasant all the time, and giving the impression that the community agrees. They can create a fake impression of consensus on any given topic.

Now that bots basically pass the Turing test, they can get you to almost never interact with a real person, but instead with machines who never actual learn, listen or change their mind. That sort of thing could erode anyone's opinion of their fellow humans. That could make one think that there's no possibility of common grounds with their adversaries.

Don't underestimate the bots, they're responsible for most of the political turmoil of the last decade.

Generally speaking I think people want to interact with other human beings, not bots.

Then there's the questionable morality of it. Companies can profit off bots scraping our info.

well what if they all came online and posted at once? could lemmy's servers handle it? 900k 'users' all alive at the same time?

Owners can use those bots to boost choosen posts/comments with a lot of upvotes or downvote something into oblivion if they don't like something. Bots can be also used for spam and advertising stuff. Overall, if the bots become active the platform will be fucked as the quality of everything will go down. One problem that affects us now is that we lost a reliable way of telling how much factual users are on the platform.

I was one of those people, I didn't understand the logic behing defederating instances with open registrations but now it turns out that those instances were right about doing that even though their reason sfor defederations were different.

There's no email verification? I sure had to verify through email.

Just because the bots are currently idle doesn't mean that the owners aren't preparing uses for them...

I dunno, between no rate limiting and no bot mitigation, you could create them pretty fast with a single machine running parallel requests.

Testing, I'd guess. Experimenting with hardware configurations, software configurations, bot configurations. Testing rate limits, looking for exploits, etc.

We can tell when they pile 1 million bots onto 5 servers all at once. Will we tell when they pile 100,000 across 10 servers over the span of a month?