As technology advances and computers become increasingly capable, the line between human and bot activity on social media platforms like Lemmy is becoming blurred.
What are your thoughts on this matter? How do you think social media platforms, particularly Lemmy, should handle advanced bots in the future?
Lemmy has no capability to handle non-advanced bots from yesteryear.
It’s most definitely not capable of handing bots today and is absolutely unprepared for handling bots tomorrow.
The fediverse is honestly just pending the necessary popularity in order to be turned into bot slop with no controls.
The Fediverse has the advantage of being able to control its size. If 10 million people join lemmy tomorrow and most of them go to lemmy.World and then lemmy.World users start causing trouble then that instance gets defederated.
Other than that we only have human moderation which can be overwhelmed.
We also have auto moderators. The recent spam wave didn’t occur on my instance at all. But my Matrix notification channel sure did explode with messages of bots being banned.
Does lemmy and other fediverse stuff currently have such a huge bot problem?
Yes. But at least with the admin group I’m part of, it’s dealt with fairly quickly, because we employ automated tools to help fight the spam.
Hard to say. That’s the problem.
A detectable bot problem is a solvable bot problem.
You can’t really tell.
It’s also a very very VERY small platform compared to other social media platforms like Reddit. (I had another comment where I calculated this but it’s ridiculously small)
It is unlikely that it would see anywhere near the same level of dedicated bot activity due to the low return on invested effort.
This is a problem that will become greater once the value of astroturfing and shifting opinion on Lemmy is high enough.