this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
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You guys can’t think there are seriously paid bots on lemmy. There are like 10,000 users. It’s basically a niche message board. Reddit is a valuable target because it has millions of users. Facebook, instagram, Twitter. These places are being astroturfed. But lemmy? I honestly don’t believe it. It doesn’t even have a core of users in any particular country. The small user base is spread all over the world. It just isn’t a target of these campaigns.
People are complicated. Everyone always points to “all that anti Kamala talk ended right after the election!” Yeah, maybe a lot of the pro-Palestinian anti Kamala people saying they wouldn’t vote for her stopped speaking so publicly because the reality of the other option sunk in. That doesn’t mean those people are paid trolls or bots. It means their argument got much more difficult when trump started plotting out his Gaza hotel. Those feelings are still legitimate. The feeling of not being able to sign your name to the lesser of two evils when that “lesser” is still funding and arming the genocidal force. People couldn’t swallow that on a personal level. But as soon as trump was elected, because it was one of two options, for the sake of not being angrily brigades, people stopped talking about it.
It’s a much more nuanced issue than bots on lemmy.
Lemmy is in a growth stage. That's exactly the time groups would want to start embedding bots to give them the most possible credulity for when they're needed.
This is exactly how voat died. There may have been an ounce of legitimacy early on. It veered into blatant far right accounts posting every top post. It's obvious this kind of thing happens on lemmy too. Especially on certain instances. For now at least the federation model appears to be doing its thing.
It'll be interesting too as federations are a bit of a wild-west right now with some domains dropping off or being federated, while others may still be created in the future
You in turn are overestimating how much effort is required for an established bot farm to add a platform to their system.
I used to see that shit decades ago in the phpBB days, you'd get accounts signing up to a board with 20 active users to post climate change denialist articles, even though the website itself had nothing to do with climate change. (Looking back on it now, the oil lobby was probably the first big user of internet forum astroturfing, but somehow nothing ever came of it...)
Exactly, it blew up exponentionally around 2016 and became of importance. That's when the US regime put Jessica Ashoosh in place.
All the clowns leaving Reddit bcs now with Trump 'Reddit isn't free' are a joke.
They have been living a lie