I am curious what can be done about the Lemmy.World era of botting corpo comments to protect their investments?

Anything remotely federated w/ LW has a massive hard-on for corporations (anti-piracy boot-lickers only added us back when we had the largest community in the fediverse), racism (you ain’t american, you aint right), a desire to troll/argue in bad faith, and a general “fuck you, I have 500 accounts to down-vote with.”

I myself have over 60 accounts on Lemmy.World; and because of that, I am 100% certain somebody has a type of SMM portal to scan for keywords and upvote/downvote accordingly.

Don’t believe me?

Go post about Apple, Facebook, Tesla, or any other 1% owned entity, and watch which accounts upvote/downvote in less time than required to read the post.

  • db0M
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    4811 months ago

    Y’all put the pitchforks down a bit. The lw peeps have been nothing but helpful. They did a mistake with piracy but they reverted it eventually.

    Fighting spam and astroturfing is something that affects lemmy as a whole ecosystem. Yes it’s more possible with instances which have open registrations but as a counterpoint closed registration also drive people away.

    We’re all in this together and should try to find ways to collaborate our defenses instead of attacking other admins

    • Stantana
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      611 months ago

      I don’t share their view on Threads. In that way we’re not all in this together.

    • Draconic NEO
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      11 months ago

      Fighting spam and astroturfing is something that affects lemmy as a whole ecosystem. Yes it’s more possible with instances which have open registrations but as a counterpoint closed registration also drive people away.

      I’m in agreement towards this. The only reason Lemmy.world is so uncomfortably large is that everyone here decided to close registrations when Reddit was having the migration. sh.itjust.works was literally born because of the fact everyone else was either closing off registration entirely or requiring applications.

      Call it spam defense or whatever you want but asking people to essentially beg for an account, which is what you’re doing, don’t whitewash it, increases the barrier to entry and makes it so people don’t even want to try joining out of fear of rejection, or worse they try, don’t know they were rejected, and think Lemmy is a buggy piece of shit and leave. Maybe it makes automated spam a tiny bit harder and moderation that much lazier and laid back but those who are really commited, the astroturfers, are still going to register and write up applications filled with sweet lies to get you to hit approve, and you will hit approve because they’ll seem like normal users.

      @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com uh, don’t take any of this personally, this isn’t made to target anyone specifically, I’m just trying to point out how the behavior of other instances in the Fediverse has contributed towards world becoming so uncomfortably large (and ultimately difficult to moderate because of it).

      • db0M
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        611 months ago

        I don’t think that’s quite the reason. lemmy.dbzer0.com was never closed for registrations, but added an application very soon which protected us from a lot of struggles. I Think LW got popular because it’s a very centrist instance, so people who don’t know what else, naturally flock to it. It was also one of the very first one, so it got a lot of early mover advantage, while lemmy.ml fell flat on its face becuase the admins didn’t think to upgrade their infra to something that could handle it until the migration was over.

        • Draconic NEO
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          111 months ago

          I feel like many other instances did also shut their doors, wasn’t just lemmy.ml, I never tried signing up to dbzer0 back then (didn’t come here until after world’s big feud over c/piracy) so I don’t know entirely what the situation here was like at the time here, I just know that enough instances took the route of either completely closing or very strict application procedures to make it difficult for Redditors migrating here.

          I don’t deny though that another big part of it definitely was lemmy.world’s more centrist mentality and more lenient moderation.

      • db0M
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        1411 months ago

        I’m pretty sure lw admins don’t want sock puppets and bot accounts either. They have access to ip info and other details and other users are also vigilant against it. But against dedicated actors there’s no perfect protection, no matter the countermeasures. If there’s instances which are enabling this behaviour more overtly, they tend to get defederated

          • db0M
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            1711 months ago

            Don’t assume malice so easily. Running around fediverse server is a lot of work and it’s also unpaid work.

            • CommunityLinkFixerBotB
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              211 months ago

              Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

      • Rentlar
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        711 months ago

        A bot for a bot makes the Lemmyverse a bot-infested shithole.

        Do the points matter that much to you?

      • Draconic NEO
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        411 months ago

        I think a better solution would be to simply ban malicious bot accounts and vote manipulators from the instance, and encourage other instances to do the same. Maybe we could set up something on Fediseer which indexes accounts flagged as bots or abusers to make this easier. If these accounts were banned from many major instances their vote manipulation would only affect Lemmy.world and ones that didn’t ban the accounts. Would be better to ban them and purge their votes from the DB than it would to counter them with sock-puppets.