How do we know that the people on reddit aren’t talking to bots? Now, or in the future? what about lemmy?

Even If I am on a human instance that checks every account on PII, what about those other instances? How do I know as a server admin that I can trust another instance?

I don’t talk about spam bots. Bots that resemble humans. Bots that use statistical information of real human beings on when and how often to post and comment (that is public knowledge on lemmy).

    • atro_city@fedia.io
      1·
      2 days ago

      Oops. Reverse question then. Why can we observe it on lemmy? How can we do that? Can’t bots operate web browsers? How would they be detectable?

      • enemenemu@lemm.eeOP
        1·
        2 days ago

        Because we control lemmy. Any server admin can request PII from the users in order to use site. We can’t control anything on reddit. Even if reddit was asking for PII like facebook, we, the people, couldn’t know if all of them are actually real. It’s shift of trust from reddit to many local server admins

          • Russ@bitforged.spaceEnglish
            1·
            22 hours ago

            I highly doubt it, one that required PII to sign up would be very unlikely to have many users (especially in the current climate, so to speak).

            And from the admin side, that sounds like a nightmare to deal with.

            • jimmy90@lemmy.world
              1·
              2 hours ago

              have you heard of online id verification services run by some governments

              linkedin uses them to verify users identities

              what do you think of them?

              • Russ@bitforged.spaceEnglish
                1·
                41 minutes ago

                I can’t say that I’ve heard of them, no. I don’t have any need (or desire) to do any sort of identity verification within any of my own personal projects (and I have not been involved with anything of the sorts at my workplace). Because of this, I don’t have any insight or thoughts I can provide on them unfortunately.

                In the context of Fediverse administration (or any service that you run yourself), even with a service that “handles it for you” I still personally wouldn’t want to step into any of it.

        • atro_city@fedia.io
          1·
          2 days ago

          Hmmm… that’s nominally better. Which user would respond to a PII request from an admin? I for sure wouldn’t. Would you? And servers could run their own bots too, no need to pretend on a browser.

          But I do agree that with control of admin and choice who to federate with, it is possible to reduce the number of bots. Eliminating them is not possible, IMO. I’d be surprised if there’s any defence against a bot that can control a browser and maybe even go as far as pretend to use a mouse.