Hello. The post you mentioned was made as a warning, to prove a point. That the fediverse is currently extremely vulnerable to bots.
user ‘alert’, made the post then upvoted with his bots. To prove how easy it was to manipulate traffic, even without funding.
see:
https://kbin.social/m/lemmy@lemmy.ml/t/79888/Protect-Moderate-Purge-Your-Sever
It’s proof that anyone could easily manipulate content unless instance owners take the bot issue seriously.
dude, it’s important.
A few persons control a large amount of bots. They can manipulate upvotes, downvotes. Silence opinions they don’t like, boost the ones they support. They can flood everyone’s feed with whatever topic they like. They get to choose what is important, what people get to think about. They can harass any single user, by downvoting posts or being generally unpleasant all the time, and giving the impression that the community agrees. They can create a fake impression of consensus on any given topic.
Now that bots basically pass the Turing test, they can get you to almost never interact with a real person, but instead with machines who never actual learn, listen or change their mind. That sort of thing could erode anyone’s opinion of their fellow humans. That could make one think that there’s no possibility of common grounds with their adversaries.
Don’t underestimate the bots, they’re responsible for most of the political turmoil of the last decade.
I can think of a way to help with the problem, but I don’t know how hard it would be to implement.
Create some sort of trust score, where instance owners rate other instances they federate with.
Then the score gets shared in the network. Like some sort of federated whitelisting.
You would have to be prudent a first, but not do the whole task yourself.
You could even add an “adventurousness” slider, to widen or restrict the network based on this score.