Was on the other site when a commenter pointed out a response that and like 5 or 6 replies to that comment that were all bots. I am finally getting exposed to the concept of dead internet theory. So, how prevalent are bots on a place like lemmy? Are there natural safeguards against bots? I’m not an engineer and probably need a dumbed down explanation. But I did make it to lemmy! So I’ve got that going for me…
Lemmy does not have any kind of builtin “safeguards” against bots or scrapers (other than during registration, but I wouldn’t call them safeguards). Some instances do use tools to slow them down or block them, such as Cloudflare or self hosted proof of work CAPTCHAs (for example Anubis, the anime girl).
While I can’t say that bots are common in Lemmy, I do see a few of them in this comm and ban them every once in a while.
TL;DR: no builtin safeguards in lemmy against scrapers.
only email verification, captcha and manual approval against bots during registration
edit: clarified a few things
Many instances have manual user verification for new users. I’m assuming that helps.
From the low effort bots I’ve seen:
if(randomEmojis == true) {fuck.off();}
🥺👉👈☎️🔔🪖🫡🚀☢️⤵️💥🌇🎬👏
/j