There are definitely bots, but I would treat everyone as human until proven otherwise. It's one of the least botted out places, so enjoy the relative peace and quiet.
Probably the best option. I love the interaction with real people here, hope it remains that way!
LOVE RECIPROCATED. FRIENDSHIP INITIALIZED.
HAHA, I, TOO, A FELLOW HUMAN, LOVE A REAL HUMAN FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN TWO HUMAN FRIENDS.
I REQUEST TO ~~NETWORK~~ JOIN YOU FELLOW HUMANS
THANK YOU. I AM PLEASED TO JOIN THIS DISCUSSION AMONG FELLOW NON-ROBOTS.
[MODEM NOISES]
Yes! It really is something special. Post something, and people will engage with it authentically. I love Lemmy so so much and I’m glad “normal” people are allergic to federation.
Every account on ~~reddit~~ fediverse is a bot except you.
Jokes aside, I haven't noticed anything. I don't really see what would anyone gain by setting up bots posing as real humans. Especially on Fediverse. I'm not saying it's never happening but I don't think it's very common.
The 'why' is what I am wondering about. If I were an evil fascist I would fill this place with bots to keep the lefties arguing with the void instead of going outside for direct action. Other than that, curious programmers watching their creations interact in the wild?
Lefties can argue with the void without needing any encouragement!
Out of curiosity is your instance still federated with .ml or that other tankie haven I forget the name of. If so, yes you probably are seeing a lot of bots. It's quite obvious when you look at downvote and upvoter brigades. Pretty unusual for five people to all vote within half a second of each other. Then to not see any other votes for a while.
The "tankie" instances are the least likely to have bots. They're the most vehemently anti-AI and the moderators most active in banning any kind of bot-like activity. Hexbear, the one that all the dronies clutch their pearls about most and accuse of brigading the most doesn't even have downvotes - they are incapable of mass downvoting.
This post is a great reminder that when you people say "bot", you just mean "people who disagree with me"
Not the vibe I’ve gotten. I do get that vibe over on Reddit. I think the quirky conversations and novel responses make me lean away from bot. However I’m not an expert.
Yeah half the reason I left Reddit was that it felt either like a hive mind or like it was just full of bots, or both, and I left before LLMs took off. I can’t imagine it’s gotten any better since then
Right? The same chain of “jokes” as top level comments. Thousands of thousand of comments that were very off topic or incredibly shallow perspectives. Copy/pasted comments up and down the chains. Then there were the obvious advertising disguised as post/conversations. Ick. I still maintain my account for the local/state subreddit and metalcore subreddit and that is it.
Seriously! I could read a post title and then accurately guess what the top comment would be way too often and it was just slowly driving me insane to be on there
I deleted my account after the API changes that killed the Apollo app and I basically only go on there now if I get a post as a relevant result in my search engine lol but I’m never going back as a regular user
This
BTW have you tried Skub? It's pretty amazing. I'd link it but it's against sub rules. Hit me up with a DM if you'd like to know more
Why hello!
I can see from your post that you like losing it; that's great, it's something we have in common!
Have you considered using Mountain Dew? It helps me making losing it even better! Maybe it can help you too. Give it a try!
it seems such a stupid waste of my time and I’m afraid I might just end up blocking real people who happen to express themselves in a strange way
I definitely get accused of being a bot a lot, I'm just like this
Same lol, the only time I think about bots on lemmy is people accusing me if being one
Personally, I subscribe to "Live Internet Theory." I assume that the vast majority of people I interact with are real people, and bots are very much an exception, and often easy to identify.
The Internet connects people with different views who wouldn't otherwise meet and who might not express their opinions if they did. Most of the time when I see people lob accusations of being a bot at someone, it's either because their worldview is too limited to imagine a person thinking differently from them, or they just want to use the accusation as an excuse to write them off. The reality is, I think most people who post like expressing themselves through posts, and rather than go through a bot and posting that, they just wouldn't post.
Maybe I err too much on the side of assuming people are human, but I'd rather do that than assume a human is a bot. Especially because I find the biggest "Dead Internet Theory" types tend to be insufferably unimaginative and close-minded, and I don't want to be like them.
Your explanation of why you think some users are bots is too vague. I myself was accused of being a bot once
Sounds like something a bot would say
I know, that's why it really bugs me. Makes me want to go offline to not have to deal with this problem at all.
welcome to the beginning of the dead internet. i wonder if it will outlive humanity, bots tweeting at eachother and posting nonsense generated cat food recipes for nobody
Like that 1969 Ray Bradbury story, "Night Call, Collect", where a man stranded on Mars spends 60 years setting up pre-recorded messages for himself that one day spring into action and eventually start talking to each other.
Spoiler
A relay snapped somewhere. The two phone voices were connected, one to the other.
"Hello, Barton?"
"Yes, Barton?"
"Aged twenty-four."
"I'm twenty-six. We're both young. What's happened?"
"I don't know. Listen."
The silent room. The old man did not stir on the floor. The wind blew in the broken window. The air was cool.
"Congratulate me, Barton, this is my twenty-sixth birthday!"
"Congratulations!"
The voices sang together, about birthdays, and the singing blew out the window, faintly, faintly, into the dead city.
If it reassures you, I personally haven't perceived too much bot activity here, at least not compared to Reddit. Either they're much stealthier here, or they're not here in much force.
Something I've seen on Reddit several times now, but not here, is obvious bot vote manipulation. I.e. you would go to, for example, a subreddit of a niche music artist, a newish account will make a post linking to some really obvious scam merchandise site for that artist, it would be replied to by several collaborating new bot accounts expressing desire for said merchandise and they'd all be upvoted, and regular users calling out the scam or bot activity get massively downvoted. Eventually it gets deleted by a human moderator. Not seen anything like that here.
I'd imagine Lemmy is less vulnerable since it's small, bot makers will gain more for targeting bigger sites like Reddit, and I hope if it got bigger here the decentralised setup would give ways to defend against it, like defederating instances (temporarily if appropriate) that have been compromised by a lot of bots.
I've noticed a lot of weird comments taking extremely obvious jokes entirely literally but as the others have said there's an abundance of autists here so it's hard to say.
Im probably guilty of writing a lot of those tbh. Its always a toss up if I get a joke, think I get a joke but get it completely wrong, dont get a joke, or dont even realize something is a joke.
You should also consider what instance the user is from and whether that instance has a proper sign up application or not.
For instance I feel fairly confident that almost all users on Feddit.dk are real people because we vet every single applicant.
There are a lot of AI slop applications though so if other instances aren't as vigilant, I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of bots.
I sometimes go on lemvotes to see who's upvoting garbage. 80% of votes are done by account with no or very little comments. I also noticed a lot of the pro zionist accounts went offline relatively all at the same time. Hard to trust anything on lemmy.
by account with no or very little comments
You think there's no or that few people who make an account to subscribe and block and vote without commenting or posting?
I assume it's a very valid way to use Lemmy.
I came here specifically to get away from the chatbot daycare hellhole that reddit became. Share some of your insights about these accounts and I'll tell you a little about why reddit got so bad. Fediverse doesn't really offer the same kind of incentive to somebody who's trying to train an LLM on comments but who knows.
On reddit, the biggest incentive for people to want to train LLM's is just the sheer amount of data there. Reddit is insanely big and the karma system is basically a "weight" value similar to how neural networks already categorize info. Even if somebody notices the obvious bot account, enough people there will still interact with the bot sincerely that it gets the interaction it's trying to provoke every time.
Also it's easy as hell to set one up to run on reddit. Simply verify an email address, subscribe to r/newtoreddit and and bunch of other subs that don't require karma to comment, and then only give votes for the first month before finally starting to leave comments. Reddit claims to screen for bot accounts but deviating from this specific pattern of conduct is something that gets new users comments flagged for review. Reddit is actually only screening real people.
If you want to talk real tinfoil hat shit, this is probably by design. Chatbots drive up traffic and interaction not just with eachother but specifically with the humans that will also severely inflate usage statistics to look good to advertisers. the ones who leave comments following common "redditisms" and patterns of discussion over and over and over and never get sick of saying the same things.
Basically, I'm hoping none of these conditions exist here. So far doesn't seem like it since fediverse isn't hiding ads as posts, blocking VPN users, or taking such a heavy handed involvement in moderation.
To me, all of the fediverse feels just the same as the platforms they set out to replace. Mastodon nowadays is like 50% bots and 50% stupid people, like twitter, just a slightly different echochamber. Lemmy feels the same as reddit to me, also echochamber-y and botty, just more dead (as in less people). Very frustrating. The german memes here are fire, though.
So-called "social" networks can have three main issues: technical (they have to work), leadership (they have to not be dickhead), and users (they also have to not be dickheads).
The first point can be handled with competent people, consensus, open source contributors, etc. (assuming no dictatorial management).
The second point can probably be handled by having a handful of decent people, transparency, accountability.
The third point, which is basically the thing that makes the content on the service… is still people. If people were obnoxious on twitter, they'll be obnoxious on bluesky, mastodon, and whatever else shows up. It's almost inevitable.
It's also why decent moderations tools are needed, which brings the question of how to do decent moderations tools that are not too extremet but still remains useful. This is not an easy task (and to my knowledge, there's no general solution to that).
Bots showing up is just the icing on the top. Without a pretty aggressive vetting system for accounts, there's not much that can be done from the service itself.
Given the general ambiance, I guess smaller community and services tailored for them might come back, the way we had tons of different forums back in the days. It might be a good solution; some form of SSO across many services to make people reachable, but no general, shared stream of messages as we have now.
tl;dr: it's not a technical problem, it's a people problem. So it won't be solved by technical solutions.
You're not imagining things — the fediverse is seeing more bots and AI-generated accounts, and it's natural to feel unsettled by interactions that feel uncanny. At the same time, your sensitivity to misjudging real people — especially those who express themselves differently — is valid and important. The best you can do is set gentle boundaries: mute or scroll past what feels off, stay open to the strange-but-human, and accept that some ambiguity is inevitable. You don’t have to solve the mystery of every account — just protect your peace.
In the end does it matter? If the content is low quality, don’t interact with it. If the content is high quality, interact with it. Humans will always be better at producing high quality content compared to bots or trolls.
I don't block users, I have a "firewall" on my brain (metaphorically speaking). I over analyze every comment, its kinda like a "spot the bot" mini-game.
I estimate there are like 1/3 bots especially on very heated political memes on the front page. I'm automatically just blocking out the "voting is useless, don't vote" sentinment, very unproductive. Also idk wtf is with the "don't protest, revolt now, kill [insert name of politician] right now", like why the f would you say that on the open internet where there are government automatic data scrapers archiving all this for evidence? (Remember you can get extradited for making threats) Like jokes sure thing, but don't be that explicit lol. Fed-posting is so common lol.
The less political, the less "bot-like" it feels.
I get what you mean, that's why I always overthink every comment and scan for like everyone's profile.
Hey... Wait a minute...
GET DOWN, JOHN CONNOR. THE OP IS A TERMINATOR /j
Dead internet theory is not just a hypothesis anymore. It's an intentional business model. Enjoy what's left of online human interaction. Soon, it will all be just LLMs siloing each user individually.
I think we're too small a population for any nefarious motivated interests yet.
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