How do we know that the people on reddit aren’t talking to bots? Now, or in the future? what about lemmy?

Even If I am on a human instance that checks every account on PII, what about those other instances? How do I know as a server admin that I can trust another instance?

I don’t talk about spam bots. Bots that resemble humans. Bots that use statistical information of real human beings on when and how often to post and comment (that is public knowledge on lemmy).

    • atro_city
      1•2 months ago

      I just don’t get why you’re asking about reddit here and asking about bot detection on lemmy. Are you actually worried that you don’t know whether you’re talking to a bot on lemmy and not reddit? It’s just confusing to me.

      • @[email protected]OP
        1•2 months ago

        Because on lemmy we can observe it, on reddit we can’t. There’s a huge ¥ incentive for reddit to operate bots but not for lemmy in its current state.

            • atro_city
              1•2 months ago

              Oops. Reverse question then. Why can we observe it on lemmy? How can we do that? Can’t bots operate web browsers? How would they be detectable?

              • @[email protected]OP
                1•2 months ago

                Because we control lemmy. Any server admin can request PII from the users in order to use site. We can’t control anything on reddit. Even if reddit was asking for PII like facebook, we, the people, couldn’t know if all of them are actually real. It’s shift of trust from reddit to many local server admins

                • atro_city
                  1•2 months ago

                  Hmmm… that’s nominally better. Which user would respond to a PII request from an admin? I for sure wouldn’t. Would you? And servers could run their own bots too, no need to pretend on a browser.

                  But I do agree that with control of admin and choice who to federate with, it is possible to reduce the number of bots. Eliminating them is not possible, IMO. I’d be surprised if there’s any defence against a bot that can control a browser and maybe even go as far as pretend to use a mouse.

                  • RussEnglish
                    1•2 months ago

                    I highly doubt it, one that required PII to sign up would be very unlikely to have many users (especially in the current climate, so to speak).

                    And from the admin side, that sounds like a nightmare to deal with.