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…

  1. 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)
  2. Hiring kids in africa and india to create accounts for 2 cents an hour. NEWS POST 1 POST TWO
  3. 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.
  4. 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

  1. 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.
  2. Cleaned up post.
  • Saik0AEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    go fuck off back to your server,

    Lmao. You’re not even a user of lemmy.ml, the site you’re actually posting to. I’ll do whatever I want because that’s the point of the fediverse. Feel free to actually use the functions of lemmy and I dunno… block me… or if you’re an admin on your instance, defederate/block mine. It’s really simple if your feelings are hurt to find your own solution without resorting to name calling and hostility. You choose hostility, and that just shows how disgusting your behavior is.

    It’s not my fault you don’t understand how firewalls, proxies, reverse proxies, web servers, http, or lemmy itself actually works. There’s SO many answers to these problems already out there but people like you act like it’s the end of the world.

    and don’t come fussing when you get overran by bots.

    It won’t happen. Because I actually understand how to run services like this.