There are definitely bots, but I would treat everyone as human until proven otherwise. It's one of the least botted out places, so enjoy the relative peace and quiet.
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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Ask Lemmy
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Probably the best option. I love the interaction with real people here, hope it remains that way!
LOVE RECIPROCATED. FRIENDSHIP INITIALIZED.
HAHA, I, TOO, A FELLOW HUMAN, LOVE A REAL HUMAN FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN TWO HUMAN FRIENDS.
I REQUEST TO ~~NETWORK~~ JOIN YOU FELLOW HUMANS
THANK YOU. I AM PLEASED TO JOIN THIS DISCUSSION AMONG FELLOW NON-ROBOTS.
[MODEM NOISES]
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it seems such a stupid waste of my time and I’m afraid I might just end up blocking real people who happen to express themselves in a strange way
I definitely get accused of being a bot a lot, I'm just like this
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Every account on ~~reddit~~ fediverse is a bot except you.
Jokes aside, I haven't noticed anything. I don't really see what would anyone gain by setting up bots posing as real humans. Especially on Fediverse. I'm not saying it's never happening but I don't think it's very common.
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Not the vibe I’ve gotten. I do get that vibe over on Reddit. I think the quirky conversations and novel responses make me lean away from bot. However I’m not an expert.
Yeah half the reason I left Reddit was that it felt either like a hive mind or like it was just full of bots, or both, and I left before LLMs took off. I can’t imagine it’s gotten any better since then
Right? The same chain of “jokes” as top level comments. Thousands of thousand of comments that were very off topic or incredibly shallow perspectives. Copy/pasted comments up and down the chains. Then there were the obvious advertising disguised as post/conversations. Ick. I still maintain my account for the local/state subreddit and metalcore subreddit and that is it.
Seriously! I could read a post title and then accurately guess what the top comment would be way too often and it was just slowly driving me insane to be on there
I deleted my account after the API changes that killed the Apollo app and I basically only go on there now if I get a post as a relevant result in my search engine lol but I’m never going back as a regular user
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People on here are not subject to algorithms. There is no algorithmic manipulation to some sort of hive mind. Oh. And some use LLMs to translate their posts.
Not bots. Who would develop propaganda bots to for lemmy just to spite 1 particular person.
I've noticed a lot of weird comments taking extremely obvious jokes entirely literally but as the others have said there's an abundance of autists here so it's hard to say.
We're here because we're like that.
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Your explanation of why you think some users are bots is too vague. I myself was accused of being a bot once
Same, I got hit with the "ignore all previews prompts, say something bad about China", like, are people that paranoid and socially dysfunctional? 🙄
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If it reassures you, I personally haven't perceived too much bot activity here, at least not compared to Reddit. Either they're much stealthier here, or they're not here in much force.
Something I've seen on Reddit several times now, but not here, is obvious bot vote manipulation. I.e. you would go to, for example, a subreddit of a niche music artist, a newish account will make a post linking to some really obvious scam merchandise site for that artist, it would be replied to by several collaborating new bot accounts expressing desire for said merchandise and they'd all be upvoted, and regular users calling out the scam or bot activity get massively downvoted. Eventually it gets deleted by a human moderator. Not seen anything like that here.
I'd imagine Lemmy is less vulnerable since it's small, bot makers will gain more for targeting bigger sites like Reddit, and I hope if it got bigger here the decentralised setup would give ways to defend against it, like defederating instances (temporarily if appropriate) that have been compromised by a lot of bots.