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this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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No such thing. Ask away!
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Yes, I completely agree that we are vulnerable to bots. The APIs are wide open by design. It will be interesting to see how it evolves but ActivityPub is supposedly designed with this stuff in mind. Yes it's easy to act maliciously and create accounts. There are a million ways to attack. It's a fact of life, sadly. Also probably the natural order - we've been chucking rocks at one another for millennia.
It happened on Usenet. It wasn't a paradise, it was full of spam and trolls and bots. However the fragmentation and self policing of the Usenet groups somehow kept the experience tolerable. Maybe we just expected less. Lemmy reminds me a lot of early BBS days. Not even any spam so far. It's remarkable - but probably temporary. I'm liking it though.
Mastodon is built on ActivityPub and seems to be thriving. I don't see spam or problems there so far. It seems quite civil. It's more like Twitter in format than Lemmy is, but the big instances have dealt with DOS and malicious actors and seem to be coping ok.
Your work sounds very cool. The development over the past few years in data analytics and machine learning is indeed startling when the ability for deception and manipulation is so easily scalable, but I think we will find ways to isolate or mitigate these issues gradually. It might take years and a lot of suffering, but innovation to solve problems is also our natural inclination.
Thanks so much for the insightful responses. You're right regarding the millions of ways to attack and that it's a fact of life. As long as there are other tribes there will be rocks to throw.
I didn't realize how much of Usenet was full of bots. I can imagine spam and trolls but it's interesting to think about the early days of bots. I take it for granted that the problem has been around for longer than companies centered around mitigation. It's heartening to know that you all handled it so well then and that the bigger instances built on ActivityPub are managing too.
On your point of mitigating these issues as they scale and grow, I completely agree. Previously in my career I worked on analyzing and mitigating malware. Bots are similar. It's a cat and mouse game. Regardless of how well we manage to detect and stop the tools bad actors use they will always find new ways to circumvent those methods. It's good job security.
Hi there - just a follow up and I appreciate the discussion because I've been thinking about this quite a bit. Bots weren't really a thing on usenet, That was the wrong term - what I should have said was spam - it was just flooded with spam and got worse and worse over time. The closest thing to an interactive bot that I can remember back then was ELIZA (wikipedia), which I daresay you've heard about but that was a local program that ran on your PC for amusement - I suppose it might have been possible to integrate ELIZA-like stuff on a BBS somehow and somebody probably did it but it wouldn't have been anything like the kind of bot you're talking about on social media that's deployed to comment - more just for the novelty value. Sending nonsense to usenet was not well tolerated, ISPs were not the best moderators but they did act on repeated abuse complaints, usually, and the knowledge needed to spoof and circumvent basic controls wasn't widespread then. I think people at the time were just into the fact that you could actually communicate with strangers via computer about all kinds of subjects. There was no point in making an ass of yourself there.
That's the other thing I wanted to emphasize about the difference between Lemmy and Usenet (there are many similarities) -- I am fairly certain there was no community moderation on Usenet whatsoever - it was a free-for-all. Spam, porn, everything. I think the only control was the ISPs who carried UseNet and they did presumably ban users and remove groups / behaviors that were really offensive, although there were plenty of really awful groups. You can imagine how that worked out - people went to facebook because it was "safer" and the structure was focused around individual connection versus community, which was also a big change. I think this difference is important because UseNet really was very cool and very fucked up at the same time. However I think the bad part could have been fixed if there was some degree of community moderation and control.