About using bots on lemmy.today

There has been quite a few reports lately about people using bots and llms to create and upvote content. I wanted to make a post to discuss this.

In my opinion, bots are a tool to quickly create or repost content. And its how users use that tool that is important for whether or not it will make lemmy a better or worse place.

Two examples:

User A

• User A frequently visits reddit and would like to quickly share content that he thinks is actually good and would be liked on lemmy.
• He uses a bot or some other tool to do this quickly and conveniently.
• Most of the posts are generally liked by the community, sometimes ending up on the frontpage, with many comments from many different users.
• A few users are complaining about bot content but the majority seems to appreciate the posts.

User B

• User B also uses a similar repost bot or a llm to generate content, but they decide that lemmy needs a lot of content and it doesnt matter so much weather or not its actually good.
• The main idea is to repost or generate as much as possible and lets users decide what they like.
• They create 30 posts in a day, where almost none of them are actually interesting for the lemmy community. Posts have no comments, and most of them are only upvoted by other bot users.
• Many users are complaining that they now see tons of low quality posts in their feeds because of this user.

How will we moderate this

In my mind, the lemmy community is fine with user A but not user B. So it requires moderators to make a decision about the content someone is creating. Does it make lemmy better or worse for the majority?

Thats how Im thinking about this, and if you want to share your own ideas or comments, I would love reading them. If you agree, easiest way is to upvote. If you dont, I would love a comment even more so I can understand some other point of view. :)

Thanks!

Hi guys,

Im doing some saturday testing for old.lemmy.today again.

Currently login is required for old.lemmy.today to read posts there. If you are already logged in, you wont notice any difference.

The reason im experimenting is because bots are hammering it, and I wanted to get some statistics of load if I simply dont allow anonymous scraping. Some bots are passing Anubis and scraping content.

So just log in if you havent and it will work just as before.

Thank you!

Hi guys,

We are now trying out Anubis in front of https://old.lemmy.today/ to see if we can block many of the bots scraping lemmy content.

You will notice an image saying Anubis is checking if you are a bot, and then things should work normally after that.

There are many millions of ips trying to scrape lemmy content so blocking on ip level is difficult. Hopefully this improves the situation somewhat. :)

Thanks to @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com for sharing info about Anubis!

Edit: It was a lot better to just turn off public access of posts on old.lemmy.today, so we are actually not using Anunis anymore. Just log in to old.lemmy.today and things will work as normal.

Hi,

We had a DDOS attack against old.lemmy.today which overloaded the entire server for about 20 minutes. I had to turn off old.lemmy.today temporarily and will look through logs and probably block more chinese ip ranges, since thats where it came from.

Always something to do. :) Keeping this as sticky for a while to inform everyone.

Edit: I added more ip blocks for Chinese networks and hopefully it will keep future bots away. Bringing up the old.lemmy.today user interface again...

Edit 2: Had to take it down again due to massive bot scraping. Currently down.

Edit 3: Decided to require login for old.lemmy.today instead of using anubis.

Hi guys,

There is some disk maintenance taking place for the next few days at our hosting provider Hetzner, and they say disk performance could be less than normal but remain operational.

It will affect our images only if it affects anything at all. So if you notice slow images, its temporary for the coming two days only. Probably we dont notice it but wanted to give a heads up. :)

Thank you!

Hi everyone!

Main theme updated today

The original cyberpunkish theme has been updated quite a lot today. A lot of things were not properly themed in the old version and the code was just hacked together. Im not a web designer so im learning while I go.

New version is rewritten from scratch and attempts to properly theme the entire Lemmy user interface. Its also using variables everywhere for how things look and feel.

Future plans

1. Make a light version of this theme.
2. Share with the lemmy community so it can be used on other instances. Upvote the post if you would like this theme as a choice on your instance.

Huge thanks to Allero

Ive been getting so much feedback on this theme during development from @Allero@lemmy.today, and he (or she) has managed to find lots of things that didnt look quite right. The theme is so much better now because of this help. Super grateful to have had a partner in crime on this one. :)

Important / How to update

In the web browser, you should refresh the theme. Hold shift, hit the reload button, and you should see the new version pop up.

So whats changed?

Quite a lot actually. Almost everything has been tuned to some degree.

• Added a top bar to complete the look. We use rounded shapes here and in the navigation menus, as an intentional contrast to the more square look of the elements below it.

• The editor and post view has been restyled with proper support for images, headlines and other things. The sidebar also improved.

• Comment indent lines changed a bit to be more in the background.

• Comments are styling code blocks, images, markdown and other things.

• Post cards got their rails tuned down a bit, and the upvote and downvote arrows follow the theme colors. There is no underline on the card links anymore, for a cleaner look and feel.

• Tables got a bit of cyberpunk feel to them

• Settings changed its look as well

• Listboxes are themed just like everything else

• And dropdown menus

And lots more small details everywhere.

If you see something that is not themed or not looking correct, please let me know and it will be fixed. :)

Hi guys,

One interesting aspect of Lemmy being federated is that there are a lot of broken servers out there who constantly fails to federate. It can be anything that speaks activitypub really, and some of those servers are not properly federating, causing a super long queue of messages not being sent or received.

Ive been adding the most broken ones to our block list so we dont spend resources trying to talk to them. We are still federating with all activitypub servers that behave normally, so this is not about blocking instances that we dont like. This is about blocking broken ones only.

Just wanted to make a post about it so you guys know, in case you see that our instance is blocking instances now. Yes, we do, but only instances that dont federate properly. Otherwise we will continue trying to talk to them forever, wasting resources.

Thats it, just some info. Have a good week!

Hi everyone,

Tomorrow our hosting provider Hetzner needs to do an upgrade of their network components, and this affects the network disk we have pictures on.

We will therefore turn off the instance during this time. If you live in Orlando, you will probably be sleeping anyway, but europeans may notice how their memes refuse to load during this time. But we will be back as soon as Hetzner finishes the maintenance. Could be earlier than expected too. We will see.

Edit after downtime: Maintenance seems to have went well, server is up. :)

Hi guys,

So I decided to change the default theme to cyberpunkish.css to make this instance look different from a default lemmy instance.

If a lot of people tell me this is a shitty idea and I should not do this, I will revert it. Just wanted to give this instance a style of its own. The default theme is still there under lemmy_default.css if you prefer it.

Let me know if you have strong feelings about it, one way or the other!

Hi everyone!

There is a new theme called cyberpunkish in the web interface settings now.

I wanted to create a theme for this instance and this is my first stab at it. If you try it out, any feedback is very welcome!

I edited this post to show how it looks now in latest version. I will sticky this post for a day so regular users dont miss info about it.

Frontpage:

Comments:

Communities:

Huge thanks to @Allero@lemmy.today for so much great feedback about the theme.

If many people think its great, perhaps we set it as default for the instance.

Hi guys,

The server just got upgraded to double the memory and cores. We had some peak periods where 8 GB was not enough to run everything, and now we get 8 more cores as well to serve more memes faster. :)

Plenty of room for more users too, if they should decide to join.

Thanks for picking this instance, guys. Enjoy Lemmy!

The attackers found another slow db query to exploit, so had to put some temporary measures in place.

Will post more details later!

This time they actually took down the instance for several hours.