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.
  • HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.comOPEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Eh- its not really a spam instance.

    They are very straightforward with what their instance does- It crossposts reddit to lemmy, in that instance’s communities.

    In that case, its as simple as don’t subscribe to it. Don’t subscribe, and it won’t popup on your feed.

    • Martineski@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, but the problem is that you don’t have to subscribe yourself, once someone else from your instance interacts with communities from that instance it will flood the “new” feed on your instance making this feed useless.

      • HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.comOPEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        My viewpoint-

        If the users of my instance want to view reddit data redistributed to lemmy- that is their choice.

        A plus side- lemmy allows you to set the defaults to only show subscribed content too.

        • Martineski@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          I guess some people may like those posts but it’s just mindless posting dependant on reddit and posting on those bot instances will get you buried by the rest of post made by bots. I don’t see how using bots for posting stuff would help to build an active community but if people really need all of the posts regardless of quality from some subreddits then it’s fine.

          • HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.comOPEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            I am in agreeance with you, regarding the usefulness of the posts. However- I am looking at it from an administrative perspective.

            Going back to my stance- I do not limit the content my users wish to see, UNLESS, it involves illegal, or extremist/hateful content.

            It’s not my cup of tea- but, I am also running an instance for people who may share different viewpoints, and I do not wish to limit what they are able to do.