this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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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.
As someone who is loathe to leave a typo in their comments and tends to err on the side of wordiness I assure you I'm just a verbose grammar Nazi, not a bot.
Your comment begs for my reply, sorry. ;-)
Loathe is the verb, i.e. "I loathe making typos", but you are someone who is "loath" to make typos. <3
I was happy in my ignorance, but now I am aware that I've been hoisted on my own pitard, therefore now I loath you. I probably did that on purpose.
Well, I hope you continue to be happy <3 :)
Haha, same here. I worry that I'm not clear enough with what I write, so I tend to over explain things. Though that might be one sign that separates me from bots, I over explain things in a dumb way. So clearly I can't be a bot!
Your sentence is much longer than the average sentence, but your total comment is short and to the point. Your word choice is somewhat unusual (more classic English than internet comment).
Thats three indicators that stick out to me that your comment is human.
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)