this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2025
360 points (95.0% liked)

No Stupid Questions

44006 readers
1011 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I came here around the time the rif app shut down, and the general vibe I get from this place is much more negative than when I joined. Is Lemmy growing more toxic or is it just my imagination?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago (4 children)

I seriously doubt lemmy is under that sort of concerted, planned attack. There are only so many bot handlers and the like and they aren't wasting time here.

There is a phenomenon going on right now where tiny sites are getting knocked offline due to sudden traffic, basically DDOSing them. It has been found that the automation of these bot farms sends out scrapers to find new places where you can post on the site. Like anything, anything hat allows you to post anything on the site. So it will find some tiny store's webfront, see it has a place for customer reviews, and then tell the bot farm it has found new land. The place then gets swarmed with bot traffic.

So literally everywhere you can post anything is getting bot traffic right now.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 4 days ago

I used to think like that until on the e-mail address I had for my lemmy.world account (an account which I left following that) I started getting e-mails in my native language from an organisation based in Tel-Aviv inviting me to attent a "learn about Israel" online course.

This was when I was already very vocal about the actions of Israel in Gaza.

That e-mail wasn't public and as far as I know only server Admins have access to that stuff.

When the largest Lemmy instance is infiltrated at the Admin level by state actors (and that's also very clearly the case for Moderation in the main forums there, as reflected by their moderation actions with even one Moderator of the news forum being very openly Zionist in his posts elsewhere), the idea that there are bots and sockpuppets around in Lemmy trying to shift opinions for the benefit of nations and even large political forces, isn't exactly outrageous.

I mean, if I remember it correctly the budget of Israel's Hasbara ops is somewhere around $1 billion a year, so plenty of money to have a few people at least part time trying to influence a place with maybe a few hundred thousand people, like Lemmy.

[–] pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Lol, I want to live in your world.

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago (2 children)

You honestly think the fascists and oligarchs are aiming for lemmy? We're not a blip, not even a sparrow, on the social media radar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_at_least_100_million_active_users

Say I'm paying you to go out there and influence people. I'd fire you if you came back and said you hit lemmy with your time and my money.

How many people do you know IRL that have even heard of lemmy?!

[–] mushroommunk@lemmy.today 7 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Sometimes it's not just the numbers but who those numbers are. Depending on what you're trying to achieve, influencing all the techy Linux nerds that seem to make up Lemmy might be more helpful than just blowing into the wind for as many as possible on Twitter or whatever.

I've got no data either way on this, just some basic social engineering training for work.

[–] brbposting@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 days ago

Agreed on influencing say influencers (e.g. decision makers in corporate IT for example who presumably would be somewhere on here)

[–] Carnelian@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

No way. It’s definitely impossible for us to ever be deceived. Get a hold of yourself

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Can't see anyone bothering with lemmy's pathetic user count, not for a few years at least. Like I said, were I paying you for social engineering, I'd be more than disappointed if you went after us.

Maybe your training taught you something I don't know? If you're talking about social engineering in the context of IT, I get that bit, taught classes on it myself.

[–] mushroommunk@lemmy.today 2 points 4 days ago

It's not always about the user count though. It's about your end goals. There's two types of social engineering. Mass and targeted. You're focusing on the mass social engineering.

Say you want specific information on how Crowdstrike works. You could launch a massive social engineering campaign on Twitter but if you don't catch any of the engineers who work at Crowdstrike then what's the point? You just spent all that money for nothing. It would be better to find where those engineers socialize online and try to inject yourself there, doesn't matter the size of that community and it could very well be on Lemmy in one of the programmer communities.

Now if you want to convince the entire world of something then yeah, focus on the big user counts, don't worry about the small fry communities. It's all about your end goal.

[–] Quexotic 2 points 5 days ago

I love the civility of this exchange. It's why I left reddit. Thanks!

[–] pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)
[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

From personal experience, this is definitely untrue.