this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025
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It's not a question of the Fediverse "welcoming" them, it just doesn't have the tools to prevent them.
Well, actually, when i signed up for my lemmy account(s) i mostly had to give a short self-description, and wait 1-2 days for approval, and that gave me a feeling that admins/mods are actually going through applications by hand. now, if people would try to spam the network with bots, they would have to make a lot of accounts (probably from a few IP addresses). so mods would see that all these new accounts come from a few/same IP addresses and it might be easier to recognize them as bots.
Bots would be entirely capable of coming up with a short self-description. Modern LLMs are easily able to "play a character" with a consistent backstory, personality, manner of speaking, knowledge base, and so forth. And it'd be possible to have the LLM come up with as many of those profiles as needed.
Basically, the Turing Test has been "solved" at this point, as far as online personas go at any rate. These comments I'm writing to you right now could be bot-generated. I could literally be a bot. There's no way to tell.
And in any event, not all Fediverse instances are as picky. Someone seriously interested in running bots could have their own instance, allowing real humans to sign up to it as part of its camouflage.
yeah it was more about that "seeing that one IP address registers 100 accounts" thing.
If they're the one running the instance it won't matter.
you know instances can defederate whole other instances?
Yes. As I explained above, it would be trivial for it to masquerade as a normal instance. Allow real people to join and it would be a normal instance. How would you detect it as being otherwise?
But it also doesn't have the incentive to allow them either. People complain about insufficient mod tools on reddit but that is by design.
Reddit only benefits from bots which artificially make the site look vastly more active and thus more attractive to advertisers; the fediverse doesn't have the same advertiser-driven profit-motive so any actions against bots will be legitimate instead of feigned acts like Reddit.
Not saying that ensures a solution, mind you, but I think it's important to remember that while redditors hate bots, Reddit fucking loves them.
It's not about the Fediverse's incentives. It'd be the incentives of the bot-runners that makes them run bots. Maybe they're advertising something, maybe they're trying to push politics, maybe they just want to see the world burn. They will be able to run bots on the Fediverse to do that.
Exactly. Good luck sweeping back the tide.