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.
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
Thank you for calling to calm
I don’t share their view on Threads. In that way we’re not all in this together.
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).
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.
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.
The only way this works (if I am to take their moderation at face value) would be for us to make more bot accounts than them.
With that said, it’s already a terrible system that benefits the 1% (who is very capable of paying devs/server farms/bot nets/etc to boost their investments).
Allowing the bots is allowing the 1% to choose the exact narrative that we see on Lemmy.
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
The moderation over the aforementioned accounts seems… one sided to say the least
I (read: IMHO) would argue that they do want sock puppet/bot accounts because it boosts the perceived traffic by laymen, yeah?
Don’t assume malice so easily. Running around fediverse server is a lot of work and it’s also unpaid work.
To add on to my point above, the only reason that they re-federated w/ us is because of the traffic they were losing to the the “tiny” community here: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy
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
A bot for a bot makes the Lemmyverse a bot-infested shithole.
Do the points matter that much to you?
If you have a post they don’t want seen, the downvotes inherently work to remove it from all the instances that use downvotes.
You don’t have to want up votes to see why a lemmy bot net is a bad thing.
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.