CAPTCHAs and sign‑up quizzes annoy real people and barely slow down determined bots. As the fediverse grows, we need smarter, more humane defences, ones that don’t push away genuine newcomers. What creative, non‑intrusive ideas do you have? Trust‑based vouching, proof‑of‑humanity protocols, behavioural signals… what feels both effective and aligned with the open social web? I’m building a social media platform and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.
I personally don’t believe that we are, not here, anyway. If I browse reddit for a while, I get the feeling that it is overran with bots at this point (like, 45 to 50% bots, based on my own subjective intuitions), as I’m not sure reddit itself is actually fighting it all that hard (on the surface, it would seem like AI traffic that isn’t ‘discovered’ to be AI traffic would still be useful to them to artificially boost user numbers for investors as well as for ad revenue. In other words, I’m not sure they have a strong incentive to weed out AI users, at least in respect to short-term profits? Though I could be wrong).
Lemmy/Piefed on the other hand still don’t appear to be very bot-ridden yet, maybe 5 to 10% at most.
I think it is a rising threat, and we’re already sort’ve at a point like it’s depicted in Cyberpunk 2077. In the future it may indeed make the internet an unfun place to be socially, but at least for now, the fediverse appears to holding it back so far. As I say, if it ever becomes overwhelmingly bots, I’m definitely going to be scaling back my participation, and if others do the same, then yes, the internet will suffer for it and be a far less useful resource, but at the same time, the bot resistant alternatives I mentioned in my other comment will benefit from that exodus, and we’ll likely just adapt to that.