As some of you may be aware, over the past few weeks there have been an increasing number of what I suspect are bots which will share one or even a few posts, all relevant to the communities they are shared in, at which point the account self-deletes. I’m torn as the stories are relevant, but they give me the impression of a narrative attack. I’ve seen only one of these accounts actually comment before deletion, otherwise they post and immediately nuke the account.
I have tagged mods and admins but have not heard any recognition on the problem. It’s also notable that by my impression this issue is getting worse. I noticed yesterday that communities I subscribe to which previously have not had this problem are now starting to receive these kinds of posts.
I want the fediverse to be a place to communicate with real people in good faith; this manner of posting runs contrary to that. So that begs the questions, is this actually a problem, and if so, what can be done about it?
I want the fediverse to be a place to communicate with real people in good faith
It’s a popularity problem. Once a ‘social network’ gets big enough to spread information to a decent user base, it will be astroturfed. Building a better mousetrap and all that jazz, they will still get through, it doesn’t matter the mitigation strategy you use. The best defense is to engage with others who are respectful, and not engage with those that are clearly rage baiting, circle jerking, promoting a narrative, etc. You will never not see it, the trick is to realize it doesn’t matter at all. Just do you.
I’ve definitely noticed it, but I don’t understand why.
I know karma farmers on Reddit would sell accounts or just try to create the appearance of legitimacy, but what does it accomplish to delete an account immediately after posting?
I haven’t noticed it at all. What exactly have you noticed?
Yeah, I’ve been banning them for bad faith engagement in my communities with the “Remove Content” toggle, and it’s gotten to the point now where they are still creating accounts but not bothering to post in my communites, so that’s good.
But the pattern of communities they post to with low/no/amenable moderation still lets them flood the channel.
Lemmy just released 0.19.14, which addresses this somehow, but the announcement is vague:
https://join-lemmy.org/news/2025-12-08_-_Lemmy_Release_0.19.14
https://discuss.online/post/31855056
Recently some malicious users started to use an exploit where they would post rule violating content and then delete the account. This would prevent admins and mods from viewing the user profile to find other posts, and would also prevent federation of ban actions.
The new release fixes these problems. Thanks to @flamingos-cant for contributing to solve this.
That’s encouraging!
@flamingos@feddit.uk thank you always for making the fediverse a safer place!
I’m unreasonably annoyed by the ones that target the comicstrips community.
I have noticed the bots behaving differently. At first the posted a lot, for shorter amounts of time which got them found out quickly. Now they post once or twice a day for arround a week, then gone.
I’ d like to know why the do it. What’s the point? But those posts get a lot of engagement so I feel conflicted about it.
Kill all posts and comments from deleted accounts.
On the one hand I like this reasoning for privacy sake and to prevent this kind of spamming, but on the other hand, it’s a shame to lose all the discussion that a post may bring about just because one user wants to nuke their account. I don’t know what the right solution is
it’s a shame to lose all the discussion
Nothing on Lemmy or Reddit is worth keeping.
I’ll occasionally find an old solution to an esoteric tech issue, but by and large I don’t disagree.
In-person verification with Guy Fawkes masks to preserve anonymity. Meet with a trusted mod/admin, show paper poster with handwritten username on it, mod reads and verify. You’re confirmed human.
I know a lemmy.world mod that claims to live in my city, we can verify each other.
/okay just kidding, I’m too depressed and lazy to do this weird meetup thing.
Honestly, I think some sort of blind verification system is what the internet needs. Some kind of notary-like system where a verification happens locally with a person, and then no info on the person gets passed out except the verification to start an account.
maybe if there was somekind of trust based verification, kind of like how certifications work. You are issued a “certification” that you are decent enough and you can issue further ones and if you mess up too badly, yours might get revoked. It would probably be a terrible hassle though. Maybe it might work as supplementary verification system though.
Yeah. Kind of crazy I can lose access to a 20 year old acct and Google is just like ‘meh can’t verify you’ and we all just think that makes sense. I should be able to somehow verify who I am and get reinstated.
I wonder… you know how webpages use widgets to try to see if you’re human? Apparently they collect various data about how you interact with the webpage to figure out whether you’re human. Perhaps they could use that data to make a fingerprint that can tell people apart. It maybe would be fairly inaccurate, but combining it with other information like IP address or location information could work together to make a better digital fingerprint.
That is a real thing, it’s called tracking, it’s NOT “fairly inaccurate”, and we should all be fighting it. Highly advanced and multifaceted digital fingerprinting, including behavioural fingerprinting, is being used by corporations to spy on our internet activity.
See you November 5th?
