this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Yes, there's nothing stopping someone from creating bot accounts on Lemmy and pretty much every other Fediverse platform. Even if APIs are restricted, they can just parse HTML instead (though that's a bigger pain in the ass). This is an area where the decentralized nature of the Fediverse works in our favor, though, as it inherently limits reach and discoverability (thus minimizing the benefits of doing this). For example, Mastodon's flagship instance (mastodon.social) had a spambot problem not too long ago, so what happened is when other instances noticed this spam wave, they limited/defederated with mastodon.social and the problem was solved on their end. The host instance can temporarily close off sign-ups to prevent new accounts from being made. Every other instance can control federation to effectively quarantine the spam problem.
Interesting. My initial thought was that botting on the fediverse might be easier than on a centralized site, since you can target your bots to several instances at a time. If one of them catches on, your bots can still function because they aren't being banned across all instances.
What you say about being able to quarantine and cut off instances that are being spammed makes a lot of sense though. I'm glad that at the least there'll be some new challenges for bot authors.
Ultimately though, the relatively small size of the communities is our best defense against bots at this point. Lemmy/kbin just aren't great targets yet because bots won't reach enough people to achieve their creator's goals.