this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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Privacy
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Is there a reason to expect bots won't overwhelm Lemmy as well?
Most likely, they will. They are not elikely to infect larger instances. Smaller instances will spot them and ban them, I hope.
Why do you expect they will be unlikely to infect larger instances?
They will still infect them but they will be more obvious.
An unusual comment, you don't know it's a bot.
Hundreds of unusual comments and doesn't engage with the local community. It's a bot.
It's partly why online discourse is toxic. There is a disconnect with th real world and online and no social stigma. On a small community instances there is.
The problem though, will be trying to manage which isntances need to be blocked as they are rampant with bota. If the fediverse grows and there are lots of smaller communities,.it will be harder to keep track. Currently it's small and most instances with active users are familiar.
This is the real question here. Especially with advanced AI, it might be difficult to spot bot accounts.
I actually believe AI will provide a far greater advantage to bots than moderators.
I (mildly) am concerned about that also...but bear in mind...the difference between Lemmy and Reddit is you can..defederate...from known bad instances. If Lemmy goes in that direction - and we undertake the idea I mentioned here - https://lemmy.world/post/44633911/22828600
then we can basically recreate a blacklist / whitelist (ala AdBlock). Instance-wide crawlers can still scrape public data, but that's an ActivityPub protocol constraint, not a Lemmy failure.
Instance crawling with bots? Sorry, no soup for you.
Spam bots on bad instances? Blocked from your feed.
Peak "fine, I'll do it myself" energy? Yes. But if you're reading this, you're 1) part of the resistance (lol) and (2) already here, so ...
Not nearly as much financial incentive for the admins to look the other way