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

There is absolutely a discussion to be had here.

Of course people should be allowed to have their own government setups and authorities. It would be wrong to assume that we in the west have it all figured out.

However there are still questions of fundamental human rights. In many places of the world a woman can legally be raped, it’s the woman’s responsibility to always have a male relative with them. If we were to ask women what they thought about it they would probably say that there is no problem with it, that’s just how it works. These women have been so indoctrinated by it that they don’t question it.

We could also use slavery in America as an example. Many slaves probably accepted the argument that they had a better living standard as slaves, or some other argument that made them accept the status quo. Should Europe just have accepted that that is the way life goes over there?

Where does the line go between fundamental human rights and respecting other ways of life go? Western fundamental rights such as equal rights, right to a trial, right to life, etc. are just that, western.

I know some clients show that, but the culture here is generally quite against the concept. Tends to lead to people being scared of going against the majority and creates a hive mind mentality to keep karma high.