Tbh, I'm less concerned with bots and more concerned with actual humans being dicks. Lemmy is still super new, relatively low traffic and kind of a pain to get involved with, but as it grows the number of bad actors will grow with it, and I don't know that the mod tools are up to the job of handling it - the amount of work that mods on The Other Site had to put in to keep communities from being overrun by people trolling and generally being nasty was huge.

How'd Mastodon cope with their big surge in popularity?

I, for one, welcome our AI overlords

I think the key here is going to be coming up with robust protocols for user verification; you can't run an army of spambots if you can't create thousands of accounts.

Doing this well will probably be beyond the capacity of most instance maintainers, so you'd likely end up with a small number of companies that most instances agreed to accept verifications from. The fact that it would be a competitive market - and that a company that failed to do this well would be liable to have its verifications no longer accepted - would simultaneously incentivize them to both a) do a good job and b) offer a variety of verification methods, so that if, say, you wanted to remain anonymous even to them, one company might allow you to verify a new account off of a combination of other long-lived social media accounts rather than by asking for a driver's license or whatever.

And of course there's no reason you couldn't also have 2 or 3 different verifications on your account if you needed that many to have your posts accepted on most instances; yes, it's a little messy, but messy also means resilient.

Those issues are comming, and we will have to develop tools to fight against them.

One such tool would be our own AI that is protecting us, it can learn from content banned by admins and that info can be shared between instances. It should also be in active learning loop, so that it is constantly trained.

Sounds like the strart of a cheap SciFi movie.

Positively marking accounts that are interacting with known humans can also be useful, as would reporting by us.

Unpopular opinion, but karma helped control that kind of stuff, karma minimums and such.

Do you think clickbait posts will start popping up in pursuit of ad revenue?

Now that you mention it... yes.

Greetings, fellow humans. Do you enjoy building and living in structures, farming, cooking, transportation, and participating in leisure activities such as sports and entertainment as much as I do?

Which of the following would you most prefer? A: A puppy, B: A pretty flower from your sweetie, or C: A large properly formatted data file?

I think we are going to have to develop moderator bots in an ever escalating war. I am not kidding.

Being a decentralized federated network and all, I guess that any solution involving anti-bots bots can be implemented only on particular servers on the fediverse. Which means that there can also be bot-infected (or even zombie, meaning full bot servers) that will or will try to be federated with the rest of the fediverse. Then it will be the duty of admins to identify the bots with the anti-bots bots and the infected servers to decide their defederation. I also don't know how efficient the captcha is against AI these days, so I won't comment on that

Oh absolutely. One of the absolute worst things that plague social media platforms, ie spam bots, troll farms, and influence campaigns, they haven't bothered to target Lemmy because no one was here.

But an influx of users means an increase in targets. In the same way we're settling in an learning the platform, so are they. It's gonna start ramping up real soon once they determine the optimal strategy. And the most worrying thing is, because of the way fediverse works, it is going to complicate combating them substantially.

That is maybe the biggest benefit of a centralized platform, and it's a trade off we're going to have to learn to accept and deal with.

Honestly we need to work on getting the community to manage bots.

All the things you are concerned about are inevitable, it's all in how we engage them that makes the difference.

We're already seeing waves of bot created accounts being banned by admins. Mods are nuking badly behaved users. What is being caught is probably a drop in the bucket compared to what IS happening. It can be better with more mods and more tools.

I just assume I am the only actual Human on the Internet, and the rest of you are all bots.

Its OK but the memes and reddit can stay away from here

Enjoy the calm before the storm.

Is there a community for building Ai Bots for noobs?

How will the fediverse protect its self from these hypothetical bot armies?

It's up to administrators and moderators of each server me thinks

Do you think Reddit/big companies will make attacks on the fediverse?

Right now It would bring more harm to them and extra accounts to us me thinks, but maybe in the future they create some boycott and controversy. ATM however Meta aka Facebook wants to join Mastodon

Do you think clickbait posts will start popping up in pursuit of ad revenue?

Is it even possible to make ads in lemmy?

I thing we still have 2-3 years before we need to worry too much about that

I am a human with soft human skin. Do not run from bots. They are our friends.

AI has gotten very smart to the point captcha’s are useless, and it can engage in social forums disguised as a human.

Yes, we have to watch out for these dang ol' bots astroturfing Lemmy disguised as real human beings. Who's with me?

The bots are coming! The bots are coming!

Has anyone thought of trying to integrate APIs from places like https://www.stopforumspam.com/ ?