this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2026
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They are already arriving to some degree.
The difference being is that Lemmy and other similar services have zero controls or ability to handle bots or bop traffic if those bots were bots from 2014.
Not bots from today.
It's a bit of a problem and honestly with increasing bot traffic across the internet and fedaverse being extremely vulnerable to it It's absolutely bat shit insane, but I don't see any other option than somehow having some form of human verification.
It's a problem
One of my favorite tricks that a friend of mine showed me years ago was this:
Put a check box or radio button somewhere on the page that will never end up visible to the end user marked with a label like "check here to verify you're not a not" or "choose your ethnicity from this list or select prefer not to say", then reject accounts that ever check those boxes, because a human never would. If you occasionally snare a blind person by mistake,they can email to bypass that with a human admin.
I don't know if it would trick modern bots, but he said it worked awesome back then.
Human verification? As in "give us your photo" or something?