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[–] 61 points 1 year ago (11 children)

Amusingly enough, brazen astroturfing (especially in political subs) was one of the main reasons I was looking for an alternative to Reddit and found Lemmy. Two years ago.

And it's certainly only gotten worse since.

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  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Same story. One year ago. That and stopping drinking are some of the best choices I've made in a long time.

    I still use reddit occasionally for its smallest communities where I know I'm still interacting with humans. I assume the top posts are all bot posts with bots flaming bots in the comments. Everyone's time is worth more than that.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Do people think there is a reason this won't happen to Lemmy eventually?

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    It will definitely happen to lemmy, unless someone conceives an ingenious AI sieve beyond current human reckoning. But the bots haven’t yet come to our peaceful little commie Linux forum, and that’s something worth appreciating, in and of itself. Every day is a blessing.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    As in I genuinely don't know if the fediverse tech helps with ai spamming - my assumption is even if it ever became a real threat to mainstream social media or big tech it would be flooded by ai bots anyways

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Even with it being federated I don't see how Lemmy could be immune to astroturfing. I'm sure there's some already going on. Lemmy just isn't yet popular enough to be a major target. Instances can defederate from one another but it's trivial to create a new account on a different instance and resume turfing. I suppose the openness of Lemmy's logs, when compared to the closed-source centralized nature of reddit, could help suss out turfers though.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    extreme versions political communities, instances are likely to get spammed, so reducing that would be defederating or blocking those instances. Lemmy will eventually have to come up with more anti-botting tools to combat this.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago

    Well, first off it can't bhappen "to Lemmy" because Lemmy isn't va site - it's a piece of software.

    It not only can and will but already has happened to individual instances. And they end up getting defederated by other instances and then either fix the problem or fade away.

    And individual users can just move to other instances (or if they're smart, just stop using or even delete their account on the problem instance and keep using their other accounts on other instances).

    And through it all, the rest of the fediverse just keeps chugging along.

    Which illustrates the key difference between Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed/etc. and traditional social media - the fediverse is flexible. Individual instances can and will and do come and go, and it doesn't affect the fediverse as a whole.

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