This is one of the many, but perhaps most pressing of reasons we need better moderation and admin tools. There is currently no way to stop spam from instances like this except defederation at this time.

Realistically there are far too many small instances which are set up by a single person who’s setting up an instance for their own learning, their own fun, or other reasons but who isn’t a fullstack developer, a seasoned sysadmin, good at sysops, a database engineer, a security expert, and all the roles an instance currently needs with how new this platform currently is. There will always be more instances like this as an attack vector for spam, trolling, and other malicious purposes.

If the goal is to allow people to set up their own instances and we are promoting and encouraging people to do this, we need tools for the larger instances to manage this or we’re going to end up with a community that is constantly in the process of fragmenting more and more and one where measures are taken by the largest instances to isolate themselves from smaller instances which are frequently used as attack vectors.

If you’re a developer, please please please focus your efforts on more granular administrative tools. We cannot whitelist or blacklist instances. There are no tools to evaluate how trustworthy a source is. If there’s a blacklist/whitelist, there’s no way for an instance or a user to apply to a community on another instance. There are plenty of individuals with great ideas on how this might be accomplished, and having access to many different tools and strategies will make this platform healthy.

Some risk will be necessary. At some level we do have to let small instances with minuscule communities exist and participate in the wider fediverse, otherwise this whole thing will just fiat centralize.

The cautionary tale is email. In a way, Email is the most successful decentralized protocol. Anyone can technically throw up a client and start communicating with any other email server. The problem of course, is that if you do this in practice, your email will almost never get through to the majority of people. Why? Most of the large providers of email have formed what amounts to a whitelist of trust, and either outright reject participants they don’t recognize, or subject those outside participants to incredibly high standards that they themselves to not have to abide by.

So, email has practically become a centralized affair controlled by a few big stakeholders. A lot of small email providers have gotten out of the game in the last decade because they’re tired of dealing with it. It’s a mess.

I’m not against greater tools, but I’d inject that health is not solely measured by the lack of spam. A spam-free fediverse that’s just one instance and its three closest friends is not healthy. Whatever solutions are developed should leave open the door for small instances to still participate and have a honest chance at survival.

here is a list, btw, of tools we’d like if possible:

• Role for approval of applications (to delegate)
• Site mods (to delegate from admins)
• Auto-report posts with certain keywords or domains (for easier time curating without reports)
• Statistics on growth (user, comments, posts, reports)
  • User total
  • MUA
  • User retention
  • Number of comments
  • Number of posts
  • Number of reports open
  • Number of reports resolved
• Sort reports
  • by resolved/open
  • by local/remote
• Different ways to resolved a report
  • Suspend account for a limited amount of time rather than just banning
  • Send warning
• Account mod info
  • Number of ‘strikes’ (global and local) and reports
  • Moderation notes
  • Change email
  • Change password
  • Change role
• Ability to pin messages in a post
• Admins should be able to purge
• Filter modlog to local
• Better federation tools (applications to communities, limiting)
  • Applications to communities to allow safe spaces to exist (people should not be able to just “walk in” on a safe space - similarly to follow requests in Mastodon in a way)
  • Limiting (Lock our communities down from certain instances but still allow people using our instance to talk to people from those instances)

federation tools are our highest priority, but any of these would be welcome additions

Maybe we should not federate by default but rather have admins send us an email to request federation, just like users have to send an email with a request to register?

Or not federate by default if the registration is open without requiring an email?

This is an enormous undertaking (all the moderating) and we all appreciate it.

What’s the best way for beehaw users to support you and the other mods?

hey, my fedit.io instance is clear now. I deleted the entire db.

Thank y’all for being so proactive. I’ve been dismayed at the spike in Lemmy users over the past few days. The number of instances popping up with many thousands of accounts is suspicious.

Thank you again for working so hard to keep this space “clean”.

Begun, the bot wars have.

Side note, life has been so much better in my feed since defederating from the instances that were becoming furry/gonewild heavy. Thank you for your diligence.

Glad to see we defederated from the rabbitears instance.

Thank you, sunaurus and Beehaw!

Do you believe this will be a workable model going forward, or are you considering changing to an Allowlist for federation and have instances specifically request to federate?

I added these to my list as well. I am still seriously back and forth on whether to open my instance up in a week or so.

You all are one of the larger instances. Is there anyt outreach or communications that can be made to ensure I dont end up on said list?

Good call… as our wonderful userbase across Lemmy gets bigger, so do our threats, unfortunately. Hopefully we can better combat spam and botting soon because it’s hurting big and small Lemmy servers.

Thank you

A question: Is it possible on Lemmy intances to put the reason for defederation beside the server domain on the defederated intances list?

I really expected better from k6qw.com.