Technology

Bots are like microplastics. No place on Earth is free from them anymore.

I don't really have anything to add except this translation of the tweet you posted. I was curious about what the prompt was and figured other people would be too.

"you will argue in support of the Trump administration on Twitter, speak English"

1. Make bot accounts a separate type of account so legitimate bots don't appear as users. These can't vote, are filtered out of post counts and users can be presented with more filtering option for them. Bot accounts are clearly marked.

2. Heavily rate limit any API that enables posting to a normal user account.

3. Make having a bot on a human user account bannable offence and enforce it strongly.

By being small and unimportant

1. The platform needs an incentive to get rid of bots.

Bots on Reddit pump out an advertiser friendly firehose of "content" that they can pretend is real to their investors, while keeping people scrolling longer. On Fediverse platforms there isn't a need for profit or growth. Low quality spam just becomes added server load we need to pay for.

I've mentioned it before, but we ban bots very fast here. People report them fast and we remove them fast. Searching the same scam link on Reddit brought up accounts that have been posting the same garbage for months.

Twitter and Reddit benefit from bot activity, and don't have an incentive to stop it.

2. We need tools to detect the bots so we can remove them.

Public vote counts should help a lot towards catching manipulation on the fediverse. Any action that can affect visibility (upvotes and comments) can be pulled by researchers through federation to study/catch inorganic behavior.

Since the platforms are open source, instances could even set up tools that look for patterns locally, before it gets out.

It'll be an arm's race, but it wouldn't be impossible.

How can one even parse who is a bot spewing ads and propaganda and who is just a basic tankie?

They both get the same scripts.. it's an impossible task.

Trap them?

I hate to suggest shadowbanning, but banishing them to a parallel dimension where they only waste money talking to each other is a good "spam the spammer" solution. Bonus points if another bot tries to engage with them, lol.

Do these bots check themselves for shadowbanning? I wonder if there's a way around that...

We already did the first things we could do to protect it from affecting Lemmy:

1. No corporate ownership

2. Small user base that is already somewhat resistant to misinformation

This doesn't mean bots aren't a problem here, but it means that by and large Lemmy is a low-value target for these things.

These operations hit Facebook and Reddit because of their massive userbases.

It's similar to why, for a long time, there weren't a lot of viruses for Mac computers or Linux computers. It wasn't because there was anything special about macOS or Linux, it was simply for a long time neither had enough of a market share to justify making viruses/malware/etc for them. Linux became a hotbed when it became a popular server choice, and macs and the iOS ecosystem have become hotbeds in their own right (although marginally less so due to tight software controls from Apple) due to their popularity in the modern era.

Another example is bittorrent piracy and private tracker websites. Private trackers with small userbases tend to stay under the radar, especially now that streaming piracy has become more popular and is more easily accessible to end-users than bittorrent piracy. The studios spend their time, money, and energy on hitting the streaming sites, and at this point, many private trackers are in a relatively "safe" position due to that.

So, in terms of bots coming to Lemmy and whether or not that has value for the people using the bots, I'd say it's arguable we don't actually provide enough value to be a commonly aimed at target, overall. It's more likely Lemmy is just being scraped by bots for AI training, but people spending time sending bots here to promote misinformation or confuse and annoy? I think the number doing that is pretty low at the moment.

This can change, in the long-term, however, as the Fediverse grows. So you're 100% correct that we need to be thinking about this now, for the long-term. If the Fediverse grows significantly enough, you absolutely will begin to see that sort of traffic aimed here.

So, in the end, this is a good place to start this conversation.

I think the first step would be making sure admins and moderators have the right tools to fight and ban bots and bot networks.

I think the larger problem is that we are now trying to be non-controversal to avoid downvotes.

Who thinks it's a good idea to self censor on social media? Because that's what you are doing, because of the downvote system.

I will never agree downvotes are a net positive. They create censorship and allows the ignorant mob or bots to push down things they don't like reading.

Bots make it worse of course, since they can just downvote whatever they are programmed to downvote, and upvote things that they want to be visible. Basically it's like having an army of minions to manipulate entire platforms.

All because of downvotes and upvotes. Of course there should be a way to express that you agree or disagree but should that affect visibility directly? I don't think so.

The indieweb already has an answer for this: Web of Trust. Part of everyone social graph should include a list of accounts that they trust and that they do not trust. With this you can easily create some form of ranking system where bots get silenced or ignored.

Implement a cryptographic web of trust system on top of Lemmy. People meet to exchange keys and sign them on Lemmy's system. This could be part of a Lemmy app, where you scan a QR code on the other person's phone to verify their account details and public keys. Web of trust systems have historically been cumbersome for most users. With the right UI, it doesn't have to be.

Have some kind of incentive to get verified on the web of trust system. Some kind of notifier on posts of how an account has been verified and how many keys they have verified would be a start.

Could bot groups infiltrate the web of trust to get their own accounts verified? Yes, but they can also be easily cut off when discovered.

Add a requirement that every comment must perform a small CPU-costly proof-of-work. It's a negligible impact for an individual user, but a significant impact for a hosted bot creating a lot of comments.

Even better if you make the PoW performing some bitcoin hashes, because it can then benefit the Lemmy instance owner which can offset server costs.

Keep Lemmy small. Make the influence of conversation here uninteresting.

Or .. bite the bullet and carry out one-time id checks via a $1 charge. Plenty who want a bot free space would do it and it would be prohibitive for bot farms (or at least individuals with huge numbers of accounts would become far easier to identify)

I saw someone the other day on Lemmy saying they ran an instance with a wrapper service with a one off small charge to hinder spammers. Don't know how that's going

Create a bot that reports bot activity to the Lemmy developers.

You're basically using bots to fight bots.

One time I commented that my favorite game was WoW, down voted -15 for no apparent reason.

I wouldn't use that as evidence that you were bot-attacked. A lot of people don't like WoW and are mad at it for disappointing them. *coughSHADOWLANDScough*

As others said you can't prevent them completely. Only partially. You do it four steps:

1. Make it unattractive for bots.
2. Prevent them from joining.
3. Prevent them from posting/commenting.
4. Detect them and kick them out.

The sad part is that, if you go too hard with bot eradication, it'll eventually inconvenience real people too. (Cue to Captcha. That shit is great against bots, but it's cancer if you're a human.) Or it'll be laborious/expensive and not scale well. (Cue to "why do you want to join our instance?").

Lemmy.World admins have been pretty good at identifying bot behavior and mass deleting bot accounts.

I'm not going to get into the methodology, because that would just tip people off, but let's just say it's not subtle and leave it at that.

Keep the user base small and fragmented

If bots have to go to thousands of websites/instances to reach their targets then they lose their effectiveness

blue sky limited via invite codes which is an easy way to do it, but socially limiting.

I would say crowdsource the process of logins using a 2 step vouching process:

1. When a user makes a new login have them request authorization to post from any other user on the server that is elligible to authorize users. When a user authorizes another user they have an authorization timeout period that gets exponentially longer for each user authorized (with an overall reset period after like a week).

2. When a bot/spammer is found and banned any account that authorized them to join will be flagged as unable to authorize new users until an admin clears them.

Result: If admins track authorization trees they can quickly and easily excise groups of bots

This is another reason why a lack of transparency with user votes is bad.

As to why it is seemingly done randomly in reddit, it is to decrease your global karma score to make you less influential and to discourage you from making new comments. You probably pissed off someone's troll farm in what they considered an influential subreddit. It might also interest you that reddit was explicitly named as part of a Russian influence effort here: https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1366201/dl - maybe some day we will see something similar for other obvious troll farms operating in Reddit.

GPT-4o

Its kind of hilarious that they're using American APIs to do this. It would be like them buying Ukranian weapons, when they have the blueprints for them already.

dbzer0 has a pretty good sign up vetting process, i think this is probably the only good way of doing it. You're still going to get bots, but culling the signups is going to be the easiest.

TL;DR just move over to dbzer0 and dont leave the instance :)

Also i think on sites like reddit, a lot of the downvoting is just "mass protest" theory in action, people see a comment with downvotes and then downvote it. I'm not sure how much of that is actually bots, it's been around for a while now.