I came here around the time the rif app shut down, and the general vibe I get from this place is much more negative than when I joined. Is Lemmy growing more toxic or is it just my imagination?
I came here around the time the rif app shut down, and the general vibe I get from this place is much more negative than when I joined. Is Lemmy growing more toxic or is it just my imagination?
I seriously doubt lemmy is under that sort of concerted, planned attack. There are only so many bot handlers and the like and they aren’t wasting time here.
There is a phenomenon going on right now where tiny sites are getting knocked offline due to sudden traffic, basically DDOSing them. It has been found that the automation of these bot farms sends out scrapers to find new places where you can post on the site. Like anything, anything hat allows you to post anything on the site. So it will find some tiny store’s webfront, see it has a place for customer reviews, and then tell the bot farm it has found new land. The place then gets swarmed with bot traffic.
So literally everywhere you can post anything is getting bot traffic right now.
I used to think like that until on the e-mail address I had for my lemmy.world account (an account which I left following that) I started getting e-mails in my native language from an organisation based in Tel-Aviv inviting me to attent a “learn about Israel” online course.
This was when I was already very vocal about the actions of Israel in Gaza.
That e-mail wasn’t public and as far as I know only server Admins have access to that stuff.
When the largest Lemmy instance is infiltrated at the Admin level by state actors (and that’s also very clearly the case for Moderation in the main forums there, as reflected by their moderation actions with even one Moderator of the news forum being very openly Zionist in his posts elsewhere), the idea that there are bots and sockpuppets around in Lemmy trying to shift opinions for the benefit of nations and even large political forces, isn’t exactly outrageous.
I mean, if I remember it correctly the budget of Israel’s Hasbara ops is somewhere around $1 billion a year, so plenty of money to have a few people at least part time trying to influence a place with maybe a few hundred thousand people, like Lemmy.
Lol, I want to live in your world.
You honestly think the fascists and oligarchs are aiming for lemmy? We’re not a blip, not even a sparrow, on the social media radar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_at_least_100_million_active_users
Say I’m paying you to go out there and influence people. I’d fire you if you came back and said you hit lemmy with your time and my money.
How many people do you know IRL that have even heard of lemmy?!
Sometimes it’s not just the numbers but who those numbers are. Depending on what you’re trying to achieve, influencing all the techy Linux nerds that seem to make up Lemmy might be more helpful than just blowing into the wind for as many as possible on Twitter or whatever.
I’ve got no data either way on this, just some basic social engineering training for work.
Agreed on influencing say influencers (e.g. decision makers in corporate IT for example who presumably would be somewhere on here)
No way. It’s definitely impossible for us to ever be deceived. Get a hold of yourself
Can’t see anyone bothering with lemmy’s pathetic user count, not for a few years at least. Like I said, were I paying you for social engineering, I’d be more than disappointed if you went after us.
Maybe your training taught you something I don’t know? If you’re talking about social engineering in the context of IT, I get that bit, taught classes on it myself.
It’s not always about the user count though. It’s about your end goals. There’s two types of social engineering. Mass and targeted. You’re focusing on the mass social engineering.
Say you want specific information on how Crowdstrike works. You could launch a massive social engineering campaign on Twitter but if you don’t catch any of the engineers who work at Crowdstrike then what’s the point? You just spent all that money for nothing. It would be better to find where those engineers socialize online and try to inject yourself there, doesn’t matter the size of that community and it could very well be on Lemmy in one of the programmer communities.
Now if you want to convince the entire world of something then yeah, focus on the big user counts, don’t worry about the small fry communities. It’s all about your end goal.
I love the civility of this exchange. It’s why I left reddit. Thanks!
From personal experience, this is definitely untrue.