If there was an actor behind a handful of accounts that are mostly run by LLMs that mimic human input and interaction or are in some form manually operated to avoid detection, it’d be easily viable for state-level/professional actors to pull such an operation off and successfully manipulate a small platform like the fediverse. Even taking believable selfies of real people that fit the profile is possible and can be anticipated.

I’m not entirely against instance-level detection that attempts to understand user patterns and prevent or flag abuse to mods and admins, but I do believe that humanized input and interaction can already be effectively emulated and will only advance as time passes.

I believe that increased scrutiny of users in a centralized manner is a privacy violation. I use my instance and I give some level of trust to the instance owners, but I wouldn’t consent to them (or the software they choose to use) handing over my PII or usage patterns to a third-party group that suspects me. I would discontinue using the service in such a scenario.

To support my point that bot detection is mostly futile on the fediverse, I’d like to your attention to a parallel to this situation in gaming with humanized aimbots - which are already incredibly viable and are implemented in a variety of ways. There are usually actual human actors guiding input to some degree, but the aimbot/etc. is designed to mimic human input to achieve believable results. I believe this could be advanced quite a bit and there are new methods popping up as every day passes.

Ultimately, I feel it boils down to just blocking instances that you disagree with the operation of to curate your experience.