I follow various “question-based” communities like AskLemmy, NoStupidQuestions etc and I have noticed some strange patterns recently. Mainly that some topics come up over and over again, like Nintendo Switch 2, foreign alphabets and foreign languages (especially Japanese). The users asking these questions will often (but not always) delete them after about an hour.

Looking into it further I’ve so far found 5 different accounts asking these questions. 4 of them have very similar profile pictures of characters from FPS video games (Battlefield, CoD and Metro), and they were all created between march 22nd and march 29th. On a recent thread of one of them, I asked them whether they were all alt-accounts. They immediately deleted the thread.

On a similar note, I asked another one of them about their thread deletions about a week ago. Once again, it got deleted rather quickly.

Sooo… Is the dead internet finally coming to Lemmy and we’re seeing an influx of LLM-based bot users which are given instructions on specific topics to talk about, as well as delete any thread where they’re called out? Or am I just being paranoid? Have you noticed any similar patterns on Lemmy recently?

Kinda sucks for me, as I’ve almost exclusively used gift cards for the last few years. I get a bonus tax-free credit card by my employer, which I can only use at retail stores. So those were a great way for me to use that card to buy games. It was also a good option for people who wanted to avoid payment providers like Visa/Mastercard etc. Oh well.

So I’m sure some of you have also gotten the spam DMs supposedly from “Nicole, the fediverse chick”. She is notorious enough across Lemmy to even have her own community now. I think I’ve gotten like 6 Nicole DMs. While those may seem amusing on their own, there is the worrying suggestion that they might actually be a deanonymization attack. In light of that possibility, are there any measures the admins here could consider to prevent this kind of attack from happening? Other instances’ solutions include for example rehosting external embedded images, filtering out external images from DMs entirely or trying to implement filters for preventing spam DMs from being sent. Especially one of the former two solutions would in my opinion be quite good options to protect the privacy of pawb.social users.