cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/177673

Today, a bunch of new instances appeared in the top of the user count list. It appears that these instances are all being bombarded by bot sign-ups.

For now, it seems that the bots are especially targeting instances that have:

  • Open sign-ups
  • No captcha
  • No e-mail verification

I have put together a spreadsheet of some of the most suspicious cases here.

If this is affecting you, I would highly recommend considering one of the following options:

  1. Close sign-ups entirely
  2. Only allow sign-ups with applications
  3. Enable e-mail verification + captcha for sign-ups

Additionally, I would recommend pre-emptively banning as many bot accounts as possible, before they start posting spam!

Please comment below if you have any questions or anything useful to add.

    • bogdugg@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      12·
      1 year ago

      I think you have the wrong idea. These are just sign-ups. It is very easy to automate without precautions in place and is unrelated to bots pretending to be human in comments.

    • nanoUFO@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      9·
      1 year ago

      Dead internet theory but I doubt chatbots are that advanced yet. They can’t write compelling and complex comments that depend on convoluted chains of logic, and respond to novels ideas and topics. Eventually.

        • baker@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          I see no problem. Everyone assumes Skynet is a murderbot because any pragmatism we can imagine for the robots would demand we be removed. What if there’s another pragmatic solution, i.e. the xkcd punchline? Just . . . rewire people to be nice.

          Even the robots in The Matrix claim to have tried to give us a utopia, but it made our minds melt down.

      • Fizz@lemmy.nzEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        There was a video of a guy who let a chatbot loose on 4chan and it had the whole of /pol/ thinking it was a team or feds. That was using gpt3 as a base.

        • nanoUFO@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          I saw that but that was a /pol/ chatbot just regurgitating things people said you don’t exactly have to write intelligent comments on /pol/, 90% of the people there write like bots. My guess performance in a slower board like /lit/ or somewhere that requires more knowledge of subject matters and where people write more intelligently it would be called out.

          I was messing around with that dudes chatbot OpenAssistant and while interesting it fails the same way all the others do once pressed hard enough (which isn’t that hard). These bots seem to do best when you just ask them to regurgitate something from their training library. Which is why non programmers are amazed by it’s programming skill (copy pasting from github repo’s and stackoverflow) vs devs in the field asking it novel questions and not getting anything interesting out of it.

    • Eezyville@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      Wasn’t there a theory on 4chan about how the internet will turn into a network of robots communicating with each other, creating content for other bots, and artificially generating outrage? No actual humans would use the internet because it would be only AI. Controlling the internet, AI controls information and thus humanity.

    • decisivelyhoodnoises@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      I liked your comment very much and this made me look into your profile. Amazing content. I would like to add you in my friend list but facebook didn’t let me. If you want please send me a friend request and I would love to know you better

    • baker@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I’ve been skeptical about every reddit comment I’ve replied to since the '14 midterms, that felt like the year the bot accounts really became a significant chunk of reddit’s numbers. It’s been horrible since the '16 general election; I’m really not heartbroken to have left.