Fediverse

😆😂🤣 Uuuuhh... Aaaah... I normally generate a random password and use it as my username for most services. Like even my bank.

This is because I've realized the username is mostly useless and is just a handle for my account. It doesn't matter to me if my username is jsmith, meow123, or kekxbek. In fact, it's easier if I don't have to come up with something novel or cool. Either way it goes in my password manager, so it's not like I have to even remember it.

I'm a real boy. I promise. Not a malicious bot.

Although... If I were a malicious bot, that's exactly what I would say! 😲

Privacy.

You can be suspicious but shouldn't just outright start banning them.

I always use randomly-generated user names. I try to avoid strings of random numbers and letters, but coming up with reasonably nice-looking random names is time-consuming, and some people might not care that much.

sounds reasonable, because this definitely looks like low-effort bots

It’s actually a good idea - I need to figure out how to do that.

For the last several years I’ve used randomly generated email addresses for every account. I can turn off forwarding when they’re inevitably leaked to spammers and there’s one less thing for demographers to aggregate data on me with. That works well when every service insists on a working email address.

But then I get lazy and use a more obvious username so I can remember it. I need to be able to auto-generate those as well

I've been using Fedi for a long time and from the very beginning I've been afraid of spam and bots ruining it, at least temporarily. Spam is still a problem with e-mail, and it's been around for 40 years and they've developed very sophisticated anti-spam mitigations for it.

Technically it can be someone who just wants to be anonymous, but honestly they could at least use something readable

No more wary than, say, CriticalBadger or SuccessfulCrab45. Some of the more obvious bots have very normal-looking names.

If I wanted to create bot accounts I would generate believable names

some people don't like personalizations. this is the first account in at least 10 yrs i picked a username for. normally it's just the string a password generator spit out. this time, i guess i figured after surving 18 months on world before deleting the account and moving. i could put 5 seconds into picking a name, since i'll likely be on lemmy until it dies. at some point in the next year i may add the word 'no' to my bio but thats an excessive amount of personalization for me.

Checking the modlog i see one user - @abff08f4813c@j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us, who [despite the weird name] seems like a legitimate account.

Which the reason afaik they have such a weird name is: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/26773150/14235814

Are there any other users you've noticed with this type of username/instance name? This is the only one i saw.

I picked an RNG name since my old common username (from reddit, etc) was not available when I started on kbin.social (RIP) and I couldn't think of anything else I wanted to be called. I deliberately kept it short though. Not sure what to make of other RNG names -- esp. long unintelligible ones -- but I've seen at least one account that I think is legit which has a long, bizarre RNG-looking username and a non-English display name, so 🤷️

You're mostly right -- those names sound like overkill. However do note I have been using Bitwarden's Name Generator (random noun + number) and I've evolved the scheme a bit ( it is now always 'user' and I keep adding numbers until the generated username is available ).

My first guess with this would be: they were read-only, then they wanted to post something or write a reply to someone and at the time considered it to be a one-time thing and created sort of "throwaway account" for that specifically, but then they kept visiting the place and it kind of just stick with them. Yet again, my guess might be completely wrong. But at least this is one of the possible motivations behind such accounts.

There are people that have a name that looks random, but has a meaning

maybe we could create a suspicious account review channel and submit them there for folks to do some digg'ing.

not sure about comms with other Admins but it would be nice to harmonize efforts amongst them a bit more/better.