Best ideas I got are random captchas, make lemmy invite only, and/or set up some sort of verification system.
Maybe the captcha failure rates visible on a user profile. These tactics can scare off new users but letting lemmy get taken over could be worse than doing nothing.
I watched twitter slowly get flooded with bots. I don’t want the same to happen here.
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HI I’M NICOLE BUT YOU CAN CALL ME THE FEDIVERSE CHICK
The bots that flood the site every link they see with no quality control are annoying as shit. And if you block them then you won’t see the minority of decent links that are in there.
It’s pretty easy to handle. Lemmy instances already have the option to close or limit signups to “by approval.”
Some bots are allowed, and you can block them if you don’t like them, but I find the best way is to report the other ones that generate spam. There’s lots of instance admins and community mods who care about genuine user interaction, so letting them keep Lemmy clean (and helping your admin with server costs) is still the best and most effective method.
I am genuinely curious what this “by approval” means. Are administrators really checking really deep into each signup? Or are they just clicking approve and hoping bad actors to not wait for approval?
It will vary. You’d have to ask each instance admin, but some will take steps to check each signup or follow up with questions. They control their server, so I should think that if they bother to limit signups like that, they’re checking each one to some degree.
Otherwise, what’s the point if you’re just going to blindly approve everything anyway?
What should be done about low post count but swarm account spam? On twitter, I probably blocked 2000 accounts, and no matter what the next day there would be new bot accounts. It made replies unusable. These accounts would only have a few posts, but they make up for it in account volume.
You can’t report these accounts fast enough, and the information space will be dominated by bad actors.
I have no issue with bots as a concept if they are marked as on. What I take issue with is the overwhelming of the feed by bots with an agenda and inaction to stop it.
I don’t think enough is done to combat this.
Manual applications and a re-approval every 6 months that you can fill out on the 5th month.
But then people will be so annoyed and leave… 🤷♂️
Fuck captchas, they’re useless and against part of the point of lemmy.
Invite only completely defeats the point of lemmy.
Verification, it depends on what you mean. Because if it doesn’t allow anonymity, fuck that.
