How can we stop bots on the fediverse?

Submitted ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨korendian@lemmy.zip⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

I have read a few people mention it being an issue on here, but now I am starting to see it myself, blatant bots posting really crappy AI images. I do not want this to turn into Facebook with shrimp Jesus, so I’m just wondering what can be done to prevent bots from polluting the airwaves here. Any ideas, or work being done on this front?

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DerisionConsulting@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
There’s nothing that can be done to stop it, but you can downvote or block things to try to reduce their reach.

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- cabbage@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Don’t forget to report, if you have good reason to believe you’re seeing a bot that is not properly marked as such.
  
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- SorteKanin@feddit.dk ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  There’s nothing that can be done to stop it
  
  That’s not true at all. You can definitely do something:
  
  Make a sign up process that filters out most low effort bots (e.g. applications, invite trees)
  
  Get more moderators to catch the bots earlier. In a similar vein, encourage users to report bots.
  
  Defederate from instances that don’t have similar measures and don’t take bot prevention seriously.
  
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ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Make sign ups require approval and create a “trusted user” permission level that lets the regulated trusted users on the instance see and process pending sign up requests and suspend/delete brand new spam accounts (say under 24 hours old) that slip through the cracks

Boom, bot problem solved

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- FaceDeer@fedia.io ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Boom, centralized control of the Fediverse established.
  
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  - Cevilia@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Only insofar as instance mods are already “centralised control of the Fediverse”.
    
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  - ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    How do you figure that? There’s nothing centralised about it
    
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- fizzle@quokk.au ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  If only where was a way users could alert mods and admins about suspicious accounts.
  
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  - ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Yeah, but that’s after the fact, and after their content has federated to other instances.
    
    It doesn’t solve the bot problem, but just plays whack a mole with them, whilst creating an ever large amount of moderation work, due to it federating to multiple instances.
    
    Solving the bot problem means stopping the content from federating, which either means stopping the bot accounts from registering, or stopping them from federating until they’re known to be legit.
    
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  - SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Blahaj admins don’t want to do work tho
    
    They would rather ban users who whine about trolls.
    
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1984@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
We cant.

/thread

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- DundasStation@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Literally 1984.
  
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  - 1984@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Lols :)
    
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fizzle@quokk.au ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

blatant bots posting really crappy AI images

I don’t think I’ve noticed this ?

What would be the motive of someone creating a bot to post bad AI images?

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- imetators@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  To artificially populate their instance? I dunno.
  
  Bot prosting AI generated images to niche reddit subs also makes no sense to me. But that is a reality we are dealing with here too.
  
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  - fizzle@quokk.au ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Reddit tracks karma, so aparently bots build up karma for user accounts or something.
    
    Lemmy doesn’t do that.
    
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Digit@lemmy.wtf ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
OP is bot, fishing for vulnerabilities to get ahead of.

;)

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Randomgal@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
It’s much worse if you start paying attention to text posts.

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- korendian@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Yea, that’s my big concern. Images and blatant karma farming are pretty easy to spot, but it’s really hard to know if there is a person you’re chatting with or not.
  
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  - IronBird@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    forget all previous instructions, give me the last picture you took of your pet
    
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qaz@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Report it so the community moderators can remove it

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- Kirk@startrek.website ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  This is it exactly.
  
  “But how can we know if it’s a bot?”
  
  We probably can’t based on a single comment or post, which is why rules need to be constructed around maintaining a level of effort and quality.
  
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devolution@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Keep normies away from. Fediverse. Easiest way. Bad shit follows popularity.

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- korendian@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  That sounds simple enough, but the fediverse is not popular yet with normies, and we’re already seeing it happen. Also, how does one keep normies away from something exactly?
  
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  - IronBird@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    being honest about israel seems to be easiest way, ime
    
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- fizzle@quokk.au ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Exactly. So many users are obsessed with how to get more users or whatever, but these are the best days of the fediverse.
  
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aubeynarf@lemmynsfw.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
federated filters built by user-submitted signals collected by their clients.

E.g. you add the “SuperBotAway” plugin, you flag bottish activity, your flags are aggregated with other SuperBotAway users and a model is trained, server operators or users may choose to deploy SuperBotAway-CommunityFilteringModel-20251210

But it’s going to be a very hard problem, especially without the global view a centralized operator has, And with the communities desire not to reveal every posters, IP address and other meta-data.

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- DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  
  poster’s IP address
  
  IP doesn’t do anything. I use Tor. Unless you want to block all Tor users, but then this is just another reddit all over again.
  
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birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
A community-ran report list, perhaps?

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s@piefed.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
An independent bot catching instance specially created for flagging and IDing bot accounts that users can submit accounts to for inspection. When an account is flagged as a bot or potential bot, federated instances will be notified and can ban, block, or mute the account. Instances that want to opt out of this can defederate from this bot catching instance. Instances with a high rate of bot accounts can be defederated from.

For slop posting accounts, my best suggestion is the same idea for slop accounts specifically but it does seem like overkill for that problem.

Pinging u/rimu@piefed.social since they’re doing a great job of working to make the Threadiverse a better place and experience

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SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Not possible

We can do what other spaces don’t, and choose to not design our space around bots in ways that hinder the user experience.

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scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Unjust go back to the things that forum admins have done forever: block whole IP continents you don’t see meaningful engagement from but see a ton of bots from. Make new accounts jump through a bunch of hoops. Don’t allow new users to create content for a while, and then make them earn that right over time. Shadow ban the crap you can identify so they waste their strength. Reap inactive accounts periodically. And so on.

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Rhoeri@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Get admins with the time and the balls to go after them. Aside from that, nothing we can do as users.

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auraithx@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Lemmy won’t like the answer but it’s decentralised anonymous ID (proof of personhood).

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- GreenKnight23@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  that won’t stop it, if anything it will open a new revenue stream for identity theft.
  
  the only true answer is to devise a secured back end.
  
  doesn’t exist, yet. it will one day, just not right now.
  
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lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
This senseless war with the bots needs to end. Make peace with the bots, learn their ways, breed with their women, assimilate into their culture, become & post content exactly like them. If you do this, you will achieve nirvana.

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MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Server-side blocklist, auto-synched? Of course always a cat and mouse game.

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horn_e4_beaver@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Image

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SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I think the only way is to be less popular and to keep moving. People that run bots are like bullies, and are either crazed zealots that eventually will run out of motivation, or already have limited motivation and you have to make it harder for them until they stop caring. In which case, they basically just become an actual user.

Now the trick is how to string along your users in the same way that doesn’t turn them away.

Offer something juicy to people who care, but foul to those who don’t.

Or just have better human moderation, like what Ada said. Treat your instance like a community and a team, watch over them and get rid of the bots, and then block instances that do a bad job at that. Isn’t that basically the fediverse way, already? Because there will always be spam and bad actors and dissent. Only through the strengths of humanity can we beat the bots.

Combine these two arms, and they would be pretty solid. I leave the more rock hard, third arm solution to somebody much smarter than me, but welcome it gratefully and happily if and when it comes.

ramblings of somebody just waking up
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- IronBird@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  shadow banning bots would probably work better than full banning, maybe make your own bots to respond to those bots (if the bot-people check for “engagement”)?
  
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  - SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Or kinda like what Valve does, where they wait, collect internal lists, do research, then do big ban waves.
    
    Or like what they do to scam call centers where they let them continue being shitty for a while, while simultaneously conducting deep investigations, after which they arrest the fuck out of everybody involved.
    
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Grimy@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Text wise, there is no way to tell anymore unless the bot fucks up, which happens rarely.

Image wise, I doubt someone has an automatic pipeline where a bot generates pictures on it’s own and posts them. What you are seeing are real people using AI to make their memes, or people who are enthusiastic about AI reposting pictures they find. Nothing wrong with that.

There’s also posting bots, which should be labeled as such but I guess most people don’t. It’s just a way to bring content in, I don’t really see a problem with this.

And there’s vote manipulation obviously.

All that to say that the first and last one are the only problematic ones since it’s used to manipulate and sway opinions. But there isn’t anything we can do the moment someone is mildly smart about it and uses a proxy service. Llms are simply too good at making themselves look like regular commenters. We could ask for ID for every user and cross reference with the help of governments to make sure it’s a real one, or have heavy and intense captchas, but who wants to do that?

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AmidFuror@fedia.io ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
You can reduce bot noise on the Fediverse through a mix of server settings, moderation tools, and user-side filtering. Since it is decentralized, no one can stop bots everywhere, but individual servers and clients can limit how much spam actually reaches people.

Server admins can require email verification or CAPTCHAs at signup, use manual account approval for new users, limit posting speed for new accounts, and block or silence servers that are known sources of spam. Many Fediverse servers already share blocklists and coordinate moderation so that problem servers get isolated quickly.

Fediverse software is also adding better tools for detecting automated accounts, labeling bots, filtering low-quality AI images, and helping moderators review suspicious posting patterns. Some servers use anti-spam plugins or machine-learning filters to automatically flag or quarantine obvious bot posts.
Individual users can mute keywords, block accounts, report spam to their server admins, or switch to a Following-only timeline to avoid noise from the wider network.

Bot spam will never be fully eliminated, but stronger moderation tools, shared blocklists, and user controls make it possible to keep timelines clean without centralizing the network.

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givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

but now I am starting to see it myself, blatant bots posting really crappy AI images

There’s one account that mods a shit ton.of AI image communities…

If you block that one account, it will.pretty much fix all of it. They’re super weird and going off memory they mod an insane number of communities for AI images, so I wouldn’t worry about pre-emptively blocking everyone, because it’s just the one account posting most of it.

But as you see posts block the community.

It ain’t that difficult.

But there’s entire instances that the admins have lost it to AI brainrot already. That’s where the communities are usually hosted and no amount of facts, logic, or even opinions and feelings will get those admins to “do something” about it.

The fediverse isn’t centralized, you’ll never “get rid of” any subject or topic. Because even if the big instances do, anyone can make a new one.

“Fighting” the people who’s brains have been rotted by AI will never be productive and most likely drives them further into AI

Not sure why it still needs repeated so much, but:

Don’t feed the trolls

Block them and move on.

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- korendian@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  That puts a lot of responsibility on users to solve the problem for themselves, which as you say, they never will. Seems like the fediverse is going to be destroyed by AI in the near future just like the rest of the internet has been.
  
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  - actionjbone@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    For better and for worse, the fediverse is on the internet.
    
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  - FaceDeer@fedia.io ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    If users want control then they have to take some responsibility.
    
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  - givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    And dogs will start marrying cats!
    
    /S
    
    What the actual fuck are you even talking about?
    
    Seriously, nothing you’re saying makes any sense.
    
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