I am clearly not equipped to identify these on my own, thanks for looking out for us!
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
236 points (99.2% liked)
PieFed Meta
4425 readers
45 users here now
Discuss PieFed project direction, provide feedback, ask questions, suggest improvements, and engage in conversations related to the platform organization, policies, features, and community dynamics.
Wiki
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The humanobserver guy definitely pinged me as suspicious as a 1 day old account with the thread trying to drum up interest in a community where people can anonymously tell all their juuuiiicy secrets!! Totally not a honeypot.
@humanobserver@lemmy.world was banned from its home instance for ban evasion.
I tore a tag off a mattress once.
TO THE PAIN!
Just seemed like a barely disguised ad to me.
Only 7?
I would think a bot-generating bot could do better
I am sure that will happen one day. It would just take one Moltbook post saying "hey check out this fun threadiverse thing...".
But for now it seems like individuals doing small scale experiments.
Maybe it is, and the rest have eluded identification. The robot could be any of us.
Hrm, sus - sounds like something a bot would say to throw us off the trail...
I think I must be a bot too, just better built than those cheapies.
just better built than those cheapies.
eh........
;-)
it could be you! It could be me!
I AM SPARKPUGICUS
Lovely, keep up the great work. 🥰
What's a basic way to ID these things in the wild?
Most of them comment "perfect" grammar and their comments are two to three times longer than normal for every comment.
There's also specific grammar tells often.
it can only guud things happen
So if I understand correctly, these are accts that have all (or most) of their content generated by LLM's? If so, I wonder what the 'bridge' is? Is it someone manually copying content over, or is it automated somehow?
In order for client applications (Voyager, Interstellar, etc) to be able to interact with server, the latter needs to have an API. Those who write the bots just attach their bots on the other end, instead of a client
Client applications and other, different stuff. Getting rid of an API would be a messy answer, and then the bad actors could just automate interacting with the web UI, same as the libraries that are used for testing web pages
The web UI may not have a standard API, but it is just HTTP calls like everything else. You can make it harder for bots, but if a browser can do it, a bot can do it without a browser.
And even if all big instances got real good at stopping bot accounts, federation means they can spool up spam servers too.
It's a scaling problem that I fear will end with the fediverse being as spammy as email (One of the original federated communication platforms)
Nice! Also jeez...
o7
Good work.
Did the james_bond1 account post other things that were since deleted? All I see on the account is one comment that appears to be written by a human - it has a typo and is asking a question rather than acting like a smartass.
Oh yeah, that one is fine. It wasn't banned from piefed.social, I accidentally included it in the list above because there was a "hey check this one out" alert at one point.
Well done!