I never used Twitter but wanted to check out the new thing replacing it over on the edge of the Fediverse. Created an account with no bio or profile pic and followed a few dozen personalities that I recognized on there. Half a day later I have 18 followers.
I looked at some of them and they were obvious bots, usernames were random alphanumeric strings, or they were promoting onlyfans, or they were trying to build followings by reblogging popular posts but not contributing anything original or curating in any human way. Others seem more believable and have realistic bios and post somewhat engaging chatter.
Not knowing what the general user experience is, should I consider most random follows to be bots or is it common practice for users to see who follows pages you like and follow other people on that list? The somewhat convincing profiles have me a little queasy thinking of all the AI bots driving us increasingly toward a Dead Internet.
Not sure how long I’ll continue but happy to test it out and follow personalities I know from other platforms and enjoy their content, while blocking all of my followers that I don’t immediately recognize. Is that standard Twitter/Bluesky good practice or am I not “trusting the process” enough and allowing full access to randos? Closest to Twitter I came was Tumblr circa 2010-2016 and in that time I saw the bots increase dramatically in a way that sabotaged community trust and got quite stalkerish.
Interested in your thoughts even if they aren’t directly applicable to my experience.
I’m a nobody so out of the 500 followers I have I’d say half are OnlyFans accounts mass following.
I get a lot of people following me fishing for me to follow back. And a lot of people follow me and all they do is post links to their gofund me and tell some story about being poor in Africa or living in Gaza. I block em. I don’t want accounts following 16k+ to spam follow me
Lol oh boy that site sounds so great
I think that’s just social media now. I’m still on fb for some reason and the vast majority of the promoted accounts seem fake, and I get followed by porn and crypto bots there. Lemmy is smaller so it’s more like drinking from a stream than a river but still a few creeps, trolls and bots here but a lot less.
Seeing Bluesky makes me appreciate Lemmy more, even if it can get echoey sometimes.
Interested in your thoughts even if they aren’t directly applicable to my experience.
I tried out Mastodon, bc I’m a fan of the Fediverse. There’s only 1 person on Mastodon who I really want to follow, a researcher who’s respected in their field but not hugely famous.
So I made an account on a smaller mastodon server and followed them, no problem. After I looked around a while I realized I kind of wanted to be on a larger server though, so I made an account on a larger mastodon server and tried to follow them… but even though I clicked “Follow”, it wouldn’t list them as someone I follow, and it wouldn’t show me their posts when they made new ones.
I’m still not sure wtf is going on… but my current conjecture (based on a couple web searches) is: apparently you can control who follows you, right? I think there is some setting where if you select it, nobody can follow you unless you approve them? So I think the person I want to follow probably just automatically approved my first follow request, but not my second? I dunno, I don’t put profile pics or write a bio or anything so maybe my account just looks like a bot account?
So I thought: I’ll just message the person I want to follow, and tell them hey I met you at such-and-such conference I’m trying to follow you pliz let me. But I read on the web that you must never do that. You must never message someone asking them to let you follow them.
Anyway, I rarely sign on to Mastodon, and possibly people there think I’m a bot, I dunno.
Crypto. Started immediately.
Huh. Took me 6mos to get to 32 followers. 🤷♂️
Following someone seems to trigger it, at least for me. I don’t know if that’s an aliveness trigger the bots can see or if immediate selling is a monetizing thing.
Or maybe I’m overthinking it with a new account, newly following people, newly being discovered by bots
