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.

  • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏English
    1•1 year ago

    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.

    There’s no concept of account age or karma here, so IMO there isn’t much benefit to the bot accounts being registered in bulk… There’s hearsay that it’s just script kiddies, but that’s not really valuable or useful info for us

    I’m hoping eventually there’s some analysis done on the bot activity logs or some sort of write-up because I’m curious what the purpose is lol