I want to remind everyone that Lemmy has had a bot crisis, a while ago I did some research into botted instances and I estimated something like 40% of user accounts are bots. Although this was a while ago so I'm not sure if that is remotely accurate anymore

Many instances will have taken steps to start purging user accounts, at the scale of Lemmy, that downturn could be entirely explained by these bots being removed

Obviously some users will leave but i do feel it's worth noting this fact

[–] over_clox@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A number of those bots are meant to share posts from other sites on Lemmy. There's actually a lot of background interconnectivity like that going on right now.

As long as the bots aren't doing nefarious things, is that a bad thing?

I don't believe so.

[–] nLuLukna@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

There's nothing wrong with those kind of bots But when you take an instance for example granitestate.social, I think that's what it's called, which when I was looking into it had 100,000 inactive accounts sat there doing nothing.

These bots that have been created over the course of maybe a week could be used to spam or brigade instances. Emphasis on COULD, maybe they just sit there. Who knows?

But many instances took to purging idle bot accounts that had been created on their instances and defedrating from instances that had excessive numbers of bots

These idle accounts are hard to detect, so only when they appear in large quantities are they removable.

Just to clear up really I guess, I'm not talking about a Reddit repost bot or twitter scraper, more large amounts of bot spam.