In the past there were bots spreading ads for pills and stuff, but now most instances ask to tell a bit about yourself before registering and don’t federate with instances that don’t. That eliminated practically all of it as far as I’m aware. However sometimes there are accounts like these:

that go around spamming content that intentionally seems to aim to disturb users. Not sure if they are bots or humans, but they are banned relatively quickly.

Regarding the karma-farming bot accounts commonplace on Reddit, I think there’s no incentive for the creation of such bots, since most Lemmy instances do not have a total user point/karma count like on Reddit.

I don’t think so. Probably still too small

The majority of new accounts created at mander.xyz would post ads about pills or crypto wallet scams shortly after being created. Now I have to manually accept registrations, and many do write that they want to make a post about their product. I deny those. But a few do get through.

I am not sure that they are bots, though, because they do fill in the registration form. And I might be wrong, but I think that a bot would need to be tuned specifically to interact with lemmy instances. I think that these might be actual people that manually crawl the web and spam.

Bots are a thing Hexbear has dealt with in the past but they were dedicated and committed attackers actively trying to stop the site from succeeding.

In terms of spam it’s a non-existent issue right now.

The nazis tend to be focused on Hexbear which has a bit of reputation over at the forum about a certain fruitfarms I will not name on the closed boards, I suspect the nazis seen on other instances leak over from there interest in hexbear. That or they’re coming from posts to genusa and other anticommunist subs about genzedong’s presence on lemmygrad.

There are certainly some people with posting and commenting bots but I haven’t seen them put to much use maliciously in a while.