With previous Rexit’s like the API debarcle etc. many users were left looking for an alternative, but with decision fatigue and bad UX etc. most did not find the Fediverse a viable option.
What needs to still improve, how can we be ready this time?
With previous Rexit’s like the API debarcle etc. many users were left looking for an alternative, but with decision fatigue and bad UX etc. most did not find the Fediverse a viable option.
What needs to still improve, how can we be ready this time?
Only way there is a mass rexit is if the bot accounts get fed up and leave.
Can’t say I’m looking forward to swarms of bot accounts descening on Lemmy
They are already arriving to some degree.
The difference being is that Lemmy and other similar services have zero controls or ability to handle bots or bop traffic if those bots were bots from 2014.
Not bots from today.
It’s a bit of a problem and honestly with increasing bot traffic across the internet and fedaverse being extremely vulnerable to it It’s absolutely bat shit insane, but I don’t see any other option than somehow having some form of human verification.
It’s a problem
One of my favorite tricks that a friend of mine showed me years ago was this:
Put a check box or radio button somewhere on the page that will never end up visible to the end user marked with a label like “check here to verify you’re not a not” or “choose your ethnicity from this list or select prefer not to say”, then reject accounts that ever check those boxes, because a human never would. If you occasionally snare a blind person by mistake,they can email to bypass that with a human admin.
I don’t know if it would trick modern bots, but he said it worked awesome back then.
It’s largely considered ineffective these days. Detecting elements that don’t affect layout is trivial, or elements that are occluded, transparent…etc
Capchas are one of the best options. But even then, LLM users bypass those relatively easily, and LLM users are one of the biggest risk areas for astroturfing.
Human verification? As in “give us your photo” or something?
I mean, fundamentally, yeah.
But we live in a corporate controlled, corrupt, world and now of these larger companies can be trusted with this process.
Some smaller communities and platforms DO this right sometimes, as they build in house processu that respect privacy. But governments world wide are making this impossible through increasingly strict compliance requirements that actually increase data privacy risks and funnel these needs to 3rd party services who just lie about what they do with the data.
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I’m not kidding when I say this is a REAL BIG PROBLEM.
bot based traffic and astroturfing will supplement and replace human communication on platforms like Lemmy. Driving the narrative and how we engage to the whims of a few rich people. Bots are relatively cheap, and easy to deploy at scale across many platforms.
There will be no open corner of the internet safe from manipulation and forced division. More people will be forced into walled gardens from corps that implement human verification, as they are the only ones with the resources to do something (While also being the source of the problem, see how that works?)
How do you carve out spaces that are protected from that? Well, you need to determine who’s a bot, and who’s and actual person.
But we can’t do that, so the alternative is we are ran over by bots and astroturfing till we’re at each other’s throats like good culture war puppets.
The future is bleak…
Answer, in my opinion, is local communities.
Perhaps it’s a bit of nationalist of me, but I think we are flooded daily with unnecessary information about what happens in other countries. In my personal opinion a random person from, say, Berlin or Paris shouldn’t be bombarded daily with news about another school shooting in backwater american town. Nor should they know what happens in politics of each other nations.
A community of my town would be useless for bots, especially if it banned all politics and ads from beyond my town. Elections of president? No dice, the only elections we care about is our mayor.
I do not live in USA. I shouldn’t know about Trump as much as I do, I shouldn’t be talking daily to americans. What relationships could I form with them? We will never go together to restaurant, bar, bowling alley etc. But place where my countrymen, and americans, and french, and germans etc. are herded together is the best place for bots.
Lemmy is not capable of dealing with bots at all I believe