I have the application process enabled for people to join my instance, and I’ve gotten about 20 bots trying to join today when I had nobody trying to join for 5 days. I can tell because they are generic messages and I put a question in asking what 2+3 is and none of them have answered it at all, they just have a generic message.
Be careful out there, for all you small instance admins.
undefined> Also, I’m suspicious that it’s not ‘spam bots’ in the traditional sense since what’s the point of making thousands of bots but then barely using them to spam anyone?
This is Twitter and web forum spam 101, you establish a bunch of accounts while there are very few controls, then you start burning them over time as you get maybe one shot to mass spam with each of them before they get banned.
It’s always about following the money for spammers/malware/etc. authors: there’s (usually) a commercial incentive they’re pushing towards.
The bot is evolving and adapting to countermeasures and becoming “smarter” which means some human somewhere is investing time and effort in doing this, which means there’s some incentive.
That said, I doubt it’s strictly commercial because the Lemmy user base is really small and probably not worth much because if you’re here you’re most certainly not on the area of the bell curve that’ll fall for the usual spambot commercialization double-your-money/fake reviews/affiliate link/astroturfing approaches.
I’d wager it’s more about the ability to be disruptive than the ability to extract money from the users you can target, so like, your average 16-year-old internet trolls.
What are the typical actors in the Reddit and twitter spam scene? And what’s the likelihood of each type setting up on here now?
Product spamming, to advertise.
PR companies that offer to sway community opinions, upvote/down vote for their clients.
State actors with various propaganda intent.
Preparing the bot accounts early in order to sell them to PR companies or other actors above.
Actors incentivized to try to turn this service into a shit hole to keep users in the normal channels for some reason or other. Give it financial incentives or ability to control narratives on other platforms.
Bots push financial related news stories or sentiment, eg. Trying to pump crypto markets.
These are just ideas off of the top of my head of the type of bots or actors running them. But I don’t really have any experience with it, just wondering what everyone’s thinking the intent is.
I think that’s likely to cover common uses outside of just ‘for the lulz’.
The for the lulz resonates a lot with me - though I know that a decade of dealing with a lot of these types assuredly biases me to at least some degree - because it’s easy enough to do what they’re doing now AFTER you figure out how you’re going to monetize it and signups this aggressive and so widespread doesn’t really make sense to me.
In my experience with content moderation/fraud/abuse work, I found that you’d often have a very slow trickle of accounts sign up over weeks/months/and, in one situation, years, and THEN they’d all break bad and you’d have entire servers and instances all light on fire at once and result in a mess that’ll take a very long time to clean up.
If you have 5,000 users that signed up all at once you can literally just delete all those rows from the database and probably not impact too many real people vs. if you have 5,000 users sign up over 6 months then you have the data dispersed in good data and now have much more of an involved spelunking expedition to embark on. I also found that it was typically done in waves as well, so you can’t do a single clean and go ‘well all the accounts that weren’t doing thing must be okay’ because eh, maybe not.
And, also, there’s a lot of hand-wringing about developer and instance politics from various blog posts, “news” sources, the fediverse, traditional social media and so on from all sides of the spectrum, and while I’d never claim to be a centrist or even remotely moderate, the more embedded in one extreme or another you find yourself you can start justifying doing all sorts of stupid shit, and a DDoS (which, quelle surprise is ongoing right now) is SO trivial to do when there’s not a whole lot of preventative measures in place that don’t require a bunch of squabbling internet humans to cooperate and work together to block signups, clean up the mess that’s already there, and work with each other on mitigation tools that do things everyone agrees with.