See THIS POST
Notice- the 2,000 upvotes?
https://gist.github.com/XtremeOwnageDotCom/19422927a5225228c53517652847a76b
It’s mostly bot traffic.
Important Note
The OP of that post did admit, to purposely using bots for that demonstration.
I am not making this post, specifically for that post. Rather- we need to collectively organize, and find a method.
Defederation is a nuke from orbit approach, which WILL cause more harm then good, over the long run.
Having admins proactively monitor their content and communities helps- as does enabling new user approvals, captchas, email verification, etc. But, this does not solve the problem.
The REAL problem
But, the real problem- The fediverse is so open, there is NOTHING stopping dedicated bot owners and spammers from…
- Creating new instances for hosting bots, and then federating with other servers. (Everything can be fully automated to completely spin up a new instance, in UNDER 15 seconds)
- Hiring kids in africa and india to create accounts for 2 cents an hour. NEWS POST 1 POST TWO
- Lemmy is EXTREMELY trusting. For example, go look at the stats for my instance online… (lemmyonline.com) I can assure you, I don’t have 30k users and 1.2 million comments.
- There is no built-in “real-time” methods for admins via the UI to identify suspicious activity from their users, I am only able to fetch this data directly from the database. I don’t think it is even exposed through the rest api.
What can happen if we don’t identify a solution.
We know meta wants to infiltrate the fediverse. We know reddits wants the fediverse to fail.
If, a single user, with limited technical resources can manipulate that content, as was proven above-
What is going to happen when big-corpo wants to swing their fist around?
Edits
- Removed most of the images containing instances. Some of those issues have already been taken care of. As well, I don’t want to distract from the ACTUAL problem.
- Cleaned up post.
Just wanted to point out that according to your stats, unless I don’t understand them well, only 26 bots come from lemmy.world (which has open sign-ups, and uses the “easy to break” (/s) captcha) and 16 from lemmy.ml (which doesn’t have open sign-ups and relies on manual approvals).
For some perspective, lemmy.world has almost 48k users right now. Speaking of “corrective action” is a bit of a stretch IMO.
This post isn’t about lemmy.world, nor am I blaming lemmy.world!
I am trying to drag in the admins of the big instances, to come up with a collective plan to address this issue.
There isn’t a single instance causing this problems. The bots are distributed amongst normal users, in normal instances.
WIth- the exception of a instance or two with nothing but bot traffic.
I’m just saying that context and scale matter. If an anti-spam solution is 99% effective, then chances are that on an instance with 100k users you are still going to have around 1k bots that have bypassed it.
Your right- But, the problem is-
At a fediverse-level, we don’t really have ANY spam prevention currently.
Lets assume, at an instance level, all admins do their part, enable applicant approvals, enable captchas, email verification, and EVERY TOOL they have at their disposal.
There is NOTHING stopping these bots from just creating new instances, and using those.
Keep focused on the problem- the problem, is platform-wide lack of the ability to prevent bots.
I don’t agree with the beehaw approach, of bulk-defederation, as such, a better solution is needed.
Some older federated services, like IRC, had to drop open federation early in their history to prevent abusive instances from cropping up constantly, and instead became multiple different federations with different policies.
That’s one way this service might develop. Not necessarily, but it’s gotta be on the table.
I read somewhere that mastodon prevents this by requiring a real domain to federate with. This would make it costly for bots to spin up their own instances in bulk. This solution could be expanded to require domains of a certain “status” to allow federation. For example, newly created domains might be blacklisted by default.