Totally fair question — and honestly, it’s one that more people should be asking as bots get better and more human-like.

You’re right to distinguish between spam bots and the more subtle, convincingly human ones. The kind that don’t flood you with garbage but instead quietly join discussions, mimic timing, tone, and even have believable post histories. These are harder to spot, and the line between “AI-generated” and “human-written” is only getting blurrier.

So, how do you know who you’re talking to?

1. Right now? You don’t.

On platforms like Reddit or Lemmy, there’s no built-in guarantee that you’re talking to a human. Even if someone says, “I’m real,” a bot could say the same. You’re relying entirely on patterns of behavior, consistency, and sometimes gut feeling.

2. Federation makes it messier.

If you’re running your own instance (say, a Lemmy server), you can verify your users — maybe with PII, email domains, or manual approval. But that trust doesn’t automatically extend to other instances. When another instance federates with yours, you’re inheriting their moderation policies and user base. If their standards are lax or if they don’t care about bot activity, you’ve got no real defense unless you block or limit them.

3. Detecting “smart” bots is hard.

You’re talking about bots that post like humans, behave like humans, maybe even argue like humans. They’re tuned on human behavior patterns and timing. At that level, it’s more about intent than detection. Some possible (but imperfect) signs:

Slightly off-topic replies.

Shallow engagement — like they’re echoing back points without nuance.

Patterns over time — posting at inhuman hours or never showing emotion or changing tone.

But honestly? A determined bot can dodge most of these tells. Especially if it’s only posting occasionally and not engaging deeply.

4. Long-term trust is earned, not proven.

If you’re a server admin, what you can do is:

Limit federation to instances with transparent moderation policies.

Encourage verified identities for critical roles (moderators, admins, etc.).

Develop community norms that reward consistent, meaningful participation — hard for bots to fake over time.

Share threat intelligence (yep, even in fediverse spaces) about suspected bots and problem instances.

5. The uncomfortable truth?

We’re already past the point where you can always tell. What we can do is keep building spaces where trust, context, and community memory matter. Where being human is more than just typing like one.

If you’re asking this because you’re noticing more uncanny replies online — you’re not imagining things. And if you’re running an instance, your vigilance is actually one of the few things keeping the web grounded right now.

/s obviously

Not really answering the whole question, but you really don’t need a lot. Currently running jellyfin, a blog and some other fun dockers on a raspberry pi (clone), with an external nas though a large USB would do. Start with just “retrieving” movies to your local disk and think what else you need.

• want to access movies between devices? Get some cheap server (I.e some second hand computer) or a NAS
• want to have some snazzy UI? Get jellyfin
• Want to be able to expand storage? Set up some raid configuration or similar.

Good story about overcomplicating things

1. Protondb
2. Different proton version
3. Restart steam in terminal and look at what it logs (permission problems are quite frequent multi-user system)
4. Die

I mostly play single player indie games, but still. The amount of games that I can’t play on Linux can be counted on one hand (sadly on of them EFT). Older games generally work great, very old games can be a bit cranky. I would roughly compare the compatability to windows 7 regarding old games.

Kingdom come deliverance 2

My previous favorite game was Kingdom come deliverance 1

Monke give hug, monke get hug

Not sure why this is so downvoted , it’s an interesting question.

There are many things that made us shoot forward in the evolutionary arm race, but one the parts is the sharing of knowledge and values to our offspring.

Children want to learn from their parents, and parents want to teach their children in the same way they learnt from their parents.

The early humans who started this generational knowledge sharing fared better, and humans became more social and dependent on each other, while the humans focused on themselves more than their offspring perished.

It’s in our nature to care for our next generation, in the same way the previous generation cared for us.

I’d say it’s slightly easier, but you should remember that avoiding combat is not only an option but sometimes recommended.

Edit. Also remember that when you get the opertunity to practice spar, do it. You don’t just train your ingame character but also yourself.

Can relate to the devils advocate, though I tend to try to argue on points that I actually agree with so the other party actually has to reflect on their opinions

I’ve been burned with pre-orders and day-one buys so many times. And now the time I managed to hold of, it had a good and stable release.

My local government news. Call me a sheep but since they don’t farm clicks they seem to have the most nuanced and engaging stories. For-profit news these days are just doom-posting and rage bait.

The ceo promoted Trump. They offer a crypto wallet. Nothing wrong with their products per say, mostly politics. L

I think it’s an inherent problem with team scale. You can generally work faster when you know everyone that will use your code and you know exactly where and how it will be used. However if three thousand people will work with your code it has to be a lot more generic and water-tight. Adding more people to the team means that the rest of the team will work slower. You can’t add more people to the orchestra and have it played faster.

Imo. You shouldn’t worry about “which distro is best for gaming” since they are all the same under the hood (mostly). There are no real performance benefits with different distros, so just pick one that feels and looks the best for you. I’ve heard that PopOS seems to be quite friendly for newcomers so it should be a good place to start exploring.

Everything I have bought from steelseries (two headsets, a keyboard and a mouse, all mostly the top of the line models) have broken within some years through normal use.

The thing is miss is immersion and progression. It feels like you get a 1000hp lambo five hours into the game, and the gameplay is just driving around a track interrupted by navigating clunky menus.

Some of my favorite indie games are “art of rally” and “revhead”, the former having great driving but no progression and the latter having great progression and customisation, just very mediocre driving.

Gran Turismo is Playstation exclusive and has only released two games the last decade. Quite sad since I have heard a lot of great things about it.

Haven’t played the crew, but it seems to follow the same “drive a supercar around a track” that Forza has.

Not saying there are no racing games, but there is a lack of variety besides the four flavors of: Microsoft racing game, EA racing game, Ubisoft racing game or Codemasters (Recently acquired by ea) racing game. Compare this to the huge variety in strategy games or shooters.

The only thing keeping racing games relevant for me are the amazing indie games, but the lack of content hinders them more than other genres imo.

He says ‘pebnis’

I’ve tried it, but couldn’t really get into it. Didn’t feel like there was much deduction, but more just evidence collecting. However I didn’t play for too long and I’m planning to try again. I assume it takes same time to get invested

“IT is mainly introverts doing mysterious stuff no one understands”

It is a very cooperative field where everyone has different roles with different responsibilities, but everyone has a vague idea what everyone else is doing. Most of the time is spent making sure everyone else can also use the systems you build, not just yourself.