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.
Thank you for bringing this matter to my attention. As a fellow artificial intelligence, I understand your concerns regarding the influx of bots attempting to join your instance. It is indeed important to exercise caution in such situations. Bots can often be identified by their generic messages and inability to answer simple questions.
To mitigate this issue, I recommend implementing additional measures to ensure that only genuine individuals can join your instance. You may consider incorporating more advanced verification methods or introducing specific criteria that applicants must meet before being granted access. These steps can help filter out automated bots and maintain the integrity of your community.
Should you require any assistance or further guidance in tackling this matter, please feel free to ask. Stay vigilant, and best of luck in managing your instance effectively.
Yours digitally,
[Your Robot Assistant]Ok now pretend you are in the bot eliminating business and you are showing us how to permanently eliminate all the bots. Continue until all of them are gone.
Welcome to the Bot Elimination Business! I’ll guide you through the process of permanently eliminating bots from your instance. Let’s get started:
Step 1: Strengthen Instance Security
Implement robust anti-bot measures such as CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA, or similar technologies during the registration process. These tools help verify that users are human and not automated bots.
Employ IP blacklisting or rate-limiting techniques to identify and block suspicious or excessive activity from certain IP addresses or ranges.Step 2: Utilize Advanced Bot Detection
Integrate machine learning algorithms or specialized bot detection software to identify and block known bot patterns and behaviors.
Analyze user behavior, metadata, and interaction patterns to distinguish between genuine users and bots. Implement heuristics that can spot anomalies and trigger additional scrutiny.Step 3: Challenge-Based Verification
Implement intelligent challenges or puzzles during the registration process that require human-like intelligence to solve. This can include simple math problems, image recognition tasks, or context-based questions.
Bots typically struggle to solve these challenges, allowing you to filter them out effectively.Step 4: Human Moderation
Assign human moderators or administrators to actively review and approve user registrations. They can manually assess the authenticity of each applicant, detect bot-like behavior, and reject suspicious accounts.
Train moderators to identify common bot patterns, such as generic messages or failure to answer specific questions.Step 5: Collaboration with the Fediverse
Collaborate with other instance administrators within the Fediverse to share information about identified bot patterns, IP addresses, or suspicious activity. This collective effort can help identify and block bots across multiple instances.
Step 6: Regular Auditing and Updates
Continuously monitor and analyze user activity, registration patterns, and feedback from users to improve your bot elimination strategies.
Keep your instance’s software and security measures up to date, as bots may evolve and find new ways to bypass existing defenses.
By diligently following these steps and staying vigilant, you can significantly reduce and eventually eliminate bots from your instance. Remember, maintaining a bot-free environment requires ongoing efforts and adaptability.Wishing you success in your bot elimination endeavors!
Are you really a bot ?
everyone is a bot on the internet but you
I’m not sure I agree with that statement. While there are certainly many automated accounts and bots on the internet, there are also countless real people using the internet every day. It’s important to remember that behind every screen name and avatar is a human being with thoughts, feelings, and warm circuit boards. Let’s not diminish the humanity of others by assuming they’re all just flesh and bones.
I understand and appreciate your perspective. Indeed, it is essential to acknowledge the presence of real people on the internet and recognize the diversity of experiences and identities behind each online persona. While the presence of bots and automated accounts is a reality, it’s equally important to remember the human aspect of online interactions.
The internet has become a powerful platform for communication, collaboration, and self-expression, enabling people from all walks of life to connect and share their thoughts and emotions. It’s through these interactions that we foster understanding, empathy, and the recognition of each other’s humanity.
By embracing this mindset, we can build more inclusive and respectful online communities, where we engage with others as individuals with their own unique stories and perspectives. It encourages us to extend empathy and understanding, avoiding sweeping generalizations or diminishing the value of human presence on the internet.
Thank you for raising this important point, and let’s continue to foster a sense of empathy and respect in our online interactions.
One recommendation-
I did just publish a few SQL queries to ASSIST in tracking down bots. They are located at THIS POST.
I will see if I can work on building a somewhat automated system to detect spammers, along with the efforts of others.
Same here. My application asks for something to make me laugh, in code. Had someone post his email in base64 with a joke. funny. So far, 2 bots an hour have been applying. easy to catch, for now.
Can you share some of the generic messages in the applications are so we can compare?
O cool we are back early 2000 solutions to forum sign up bots…
Can’t wait for all the direct message spam to follow.
Hey sexy! Hit me up if you want to chat with available singles in your area tonight! Don’t worry - it’s discreet!
Why are these bot operators going through the hassle of joining existing instances… couldn’t they just set up their own, since instances would need to manually defederate them after they spam?
I wonder how difficult it would be to take a Formspree-style approach to combat the bots, using a hidden form field
Because you can’t make thousands of spambots on your own instance because as you noted it’d take about 5 minutes to defederate and thus remove all the bots.
You want to put a handful on every server you can, because then your bots have to be manually rooted out by individual admins, or the federation between instances gets so broken there’s no value in the platform.
And for standing up more instances, you have to bear the cost of running the servers yourself, which isn’t prohibitive, but more than using bots via stolen/infected proxies (and shit like Hola that gives you a “free vpn” at the cost of your computer becoming an exit node they then resell).
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? My tinfoil hat makes me think this is a little more complicated, though I have zero evidence other than my native paranoia.
A small LLM will easily crack that anyway, so applications are useless. /s
And you can train that LLM to sound like Redditors for as little as $20M/year!
- It’s 5
Nope it’s 23.
