Hal

Unfortunately Lemmy has one major problem when it comes to banning spam bots. Only the instance that a user belongs to can ban the user in a way that federates to other instances. This means if that particular instance doesn’t quickly ban the user, then hundreds of other instances need to do it manually. Currently, a pretty significant percentage of spammers get banned individually by many instances.

If we had 100x as many users and 100x as many instances, we would have 100x as many bot accounts for every instance to ban.

The solution is probably something like shared ban lists or ban mirroring (setting an instance up to ban every user that some trusted instance bans). But right now it’s just people clicking, and it’s not scalable.

Lemmy definitely has LLM bot accounts, but the Lemmy is operating at a scale of tens of thousands of users where Mastodon has a couple of million. There’s a lot of manual action by Lemmy admins that probably won’t scale well when there are millions of users.

As someone else already mentioned, it’s almost certainly already happening. Lemmy federates with Mastodon, and Mastodon has a user base and a volume of content that would be hard to ignore. So there are likely many Mastodon instances that are slurping up content from Mastodon, Lemmy, Piefed, Pixelfed, anything else across the Fediverse, and using this to train AI.

It would just be nice if they didn’t crash servers doing it.

Bots scraping the website cause high levels of server load because compiling a page is an intensive activity, and so instance admins are taking active steps to stop this in order to stop all the scrapers bringing down the server.

But if they actually wanted Lemmy content (as opposed to the bots scraping everything on the internet they can find, and happening across Lemmy) then they can just start an instance and have other instances send them the content via normal federation. It would be almost impossible to tell this from a normal instance, and would be more efficient for everyone involved.

If your aim was to power a PC then you wouldn’t use a normal keyboard. Why not have something much like a typewriter of old, with a long travel distance for the key? Instead of moving a stamp on a stick, use that kenetic energy to generate power instead. Surely you could get a lot more power out it it that way.

Hot damn, and here’s me thinking thefuck was the way to do this.