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?

  • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    63·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • Jiggle_Physics@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        73·
        2 months ago

        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?!

        • mushroommunk@lemmy.today
          5·
          2 months ago

          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.

          • brbposting@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            2·
            2 months ago

            Agreed on influencing say influencers (e.g. decision makers in corporate IT for example who presumably would be somewhere on here)

          • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
            33·
            2 months ago

            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.

            • mushroommunk@lemmy.today
              1·
              2 months ago

              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.