There was already a wave of bots identified iirc. They were identified only because:

1 the bots had random letters for usernames

2 the bots did nothing but downvote, instantly downvoting every post by specific people who held specific opinions

Turned into a flamware, by the time I learned about it I think the mods had deleted a lot of the discussion. But, like the big tech platforms, the plan for bots likely is going to be "oh crap, we have no idea how to solve this issue." I don't intend to did the admins, bots are just a pain in the ass to stop.

As far as I'm aware, there are no ways implemented. Got no idea because I'm not smart enough for this type of thing. The only solution I could think of is to implement a paywall (I know, disgusting) to raise the barrier to entry to try and keep bots out. That, and I don't know if it's currently possible, but making it so only people on your instance can comment, vote, and report posts on an instance.

I personally feel that depending on the price of joining, that could slightly lessen the bot problem for that specific instance since getting banned means you wasted money instead of just time. Though, it might also alienate it from growing as well.

We're not handling the LLM generative bullshit bots now, anywhere. There's a thing called the dead Internet theory. Essentially most of the traffic on the Internet now is bots.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

I saw a comment the other day saying that "the line between the most advanced bot and the least talkative human is getting more and more thinner"

Which made me think: what if bots are setup to pretend to be actual users? With a fake life that they could talk about, fake anecdotes, fake hobbies, fake jokes but everything would seem legit and consistent. That would be pretty weird, but probably impossible to detect.

And then when that roleplaying bot once in a while recommends a product, you would probably trust them, after all they gave you advice for your cat last week.

Not sure what to do in that scenario, really

I think smarter people than me will have to figure it out and even then it's going to be a war of escalation. Ban the bots, build better bots, back and forth back and forth.

Some news sites had an interesting take on comments sections. Before you could comment on an article, you had to correctly answer a 5 question quiz proving you actually read it.

But AI can do that now too.

To manage advanced bots, platforms like Lemmy should:

• Verification: Implement robust account verification and clearly label bot accounts.
• Behavioral Analysis: Use algorithms to identify bot-like behavior.
• User Reporting: Enable easy reporting of suspected bots by users.
• Rate Limiting: Limit posting frequency to reduce spam.
• Content Moderation: Enhance tools to detect and manage bot-generated content.
• User Education: Provide resources to help users recognize bots.
• Adaptive Policies: Regularly update policies to counter evolving bot tactics.

These strategies can help maintain a healthier online community.

"We should join them. It would be wise, Gandalf. There is hope that way."

For commercial services like Twitter or Reddit the bots make sense because it lets the platforms have inflated "user" numbers while also more random nonsense to sell ads against.

But for the fediverse, the goals would be, post random stuff into the void and profit?? Like I guess you could long game some users into a product that they only research on the fediverse, but seems more cost effective for the botnets to attack the commercial networks first.

We are already invaded by bots, look at this https://beehaw.org/c/technology@lemmy.ml