I’m new to the fediverse, and so far, I have been seeing some situations from lemmy instances rejecting users to defederating from others, but I ask myself: what can be done if trolls or bots come from self-hosted single-user instances?
They get defederated wherever they get consistently banned…and then they can federate with their friends and make their community of shit and yell at each other or something.
Can it be practical if several instances get created programmatically?
Well, if we had a DDOS-like barrage of troll instances, probably a solution would be to institute a “pending federation request” for any new communities.
A reputation/trustworthiness rating for instances might be helpful too, something akin to karma but for the instance as a whole. More vulnerable communities would be able to set a minimum trust requirement for unapproved participation.
Matrix was working on something similar a whole back, although it may be easier to do on Lemmy
This should be the default in the next Lemmy version because otherwise it’s only going to get easier for people to launch new instances and it’s going to get too overwhelming
Looks interestsing.
Would it be also possible to ask for a captcha on the first interactions users from new instances make?
No, because they would have to solve captchas on every instance they’re federated with. You’d be solving like 29 captchas per post
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I agree with Jamie. While it is certainly possible for a bad actor to spin up burner instances for the purposes of evading defederation, that’s a disproportionate amount of effort compared to just creating a new account somewhere that already exists.
Will we see it happen? Probably. But it honestly seems easier to deal with than if those bad actors were to hide themselves in established instances.
Assuming you can block a top level domain and have it apply to all subdomains, doing so would force the troll to pay for another domain to get around the block. That could add up to quite the expense.
I don’t usually make a habit of being an ass, but I am extra careful about what I say because I choose to self host. Since any instance admin that decides not to take a liking to me could take one look at my instance and defederate me without a second thought. If anything, self-hosting makes you more vulnerable than just normally ban evading on an open instance.
