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.
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The place feels different today than it did just a couple of days ago, and it positively reeks of bots.
I’m seeing far fewer original posts and far more links to karma-farmer quality pabulum, all of which pretty much instantly somehow get hundreds of upvotes.
The bots are here. And they’re circlejerking.
Yup. And, I would bet money, it will get progressively worse, unless steps are taken to prevent it.
Theres some that aren’t just money.
There are bots that mirror content from Reddit, just linking to them.
I’ve seen posts that are 3 or 4 crossposts (between community/instances) deep.I want content.
I don’t want bot contentGive it a week or two, and you will start to see the emergence of tools to assist with combating these issues.
I am working on trying to build a GUI for one project to help combat spam.
There is also lemmy_helper And- its only a short matter of time before we gain access to much more powerful tools to help.
how about going through the 4chan approach of nobody cares, everybody spams whatever they like? then the corpos can wallow in their own poo?
IMO long term Lemmy needs to move away from upvotes as a measure of interest and activity. That’s too easy to manipulate.
Perhaps comment activity and interaction metrics would be better.
If you always had e-mail verification turned on then you can get rid of some of these junk sign-ups relatively easy, I wrote a guide for it here: https://lemdit.com/post/16430
From what I’ve seen, most of the bot sign-ups that are swelling instance User numbers wouldn’t have passed e-mail verification. I think it was done mostly to prove a point, rather than an attempt to actually use those accounts.
Instances that didn’t have e-mail verification turned on are in a much harder spot.
What, corrective courses of action shall we seek?
(Tagging large instance owners)
- @ruud@lemmy.world (lemmy.world)
- @nutomic@lemmy.ml (lemmy.ml)
- @TheDude@sh.itjust.works (sh.itjust.works)
- @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com (dbzer0)
I sent messages to these users, notifying them to come to this thread.
- https://startrek.website/u/ValueSubtracted (startek.website)
They were able to get back with me- and provided this comment:
Thank you - we increased our security and attempted to purge our bots three days ago - if further suspicious activity is detected, we want to hear about it.
- https://oceanbreeze.earth/u/windocean (oceanbreeze.earth)
- https://normalcity.life/u/EuphoricPenguin22 (normalcity.life)
User returned this comment to me:
We just banned and subsequently deleted well over 2500+ of these accounts. We’ve just switched to closed registration as well.
You may also want to block lemmit.online
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.
Lol well it was fun while it lasted! Man there are some really greedy assholes out there.
Well- I have not seen much evidence that supports this is actively being used… yet.
Just- bringing more attention to how easy it is to do.
I dont have much to add other than I am an experienced admin and was dismayed at how vulnerable Lemmy is. Having an option to have open registrations with no checks is not great. No serious platform would allow that.
I dont know of a bulletproof way to weed put the bad actors, but a voting system that Lemmy can leverage, with a minimum reputation in order to stay federated might work. This would require some changes that I’m not sure the devs can or would make. Without any protection in place, people will get frustrated and abandon Lemmy. I would.
When I made a post saying that 90% (now ~95%) of accounts on lemmy are bots the amount of people saying that there’s no proof and/or saying to me that there’s a lot of people joining from reddit right now was astonishing.
Edit: one person said me that noone would make 1.6mln bots when there are only 150k-200k users on the platform, like WTF.
the problem is that activity pub is dumb and bad
This, isn’t a problem specific to activity pub, lemmy, or any individual platform in general.
Reddit faces this problem every day. Facebook faces this problem. Twitter faces this problem.
They all do.
And, each platform has to determine the best method for that platform to deal with this issue.
Honestly, I’m interested to see how the federation handles this problem. Thank you for all the attention you’re bringing to it.
My fear is that we might overcorrect by becoming too defederation-happy, which is a fear it seems that you share. However I disagree with your assertion that the federation model is more risky than conventional Reddit-like models. Instance owners have just as many tools (more, in fact) as Reddit does to combat bots on their instance. Plus we have the nuke-from-orbit defederation option.
Since it seems like most of these bots are coming from established instances (rather than spoofing their own), I agree with you that the right approach seems to be for instance mods to maintain stricter signups (captcha, email verification, application, or other original methods). My hope is that federation will naturally lead to a “survival of the fittest” where more bot-ridden instances will copy the methods of the less bot-ridden instances.
I think an instance should only consider defederation if it’s already being plagued by bot interference from a particular instance. I don’t think defederation should be a pre-emptive action.
- Hiring kids in africa and india to create accounts for 2 cents an hour.
Heads up that this depends on the operation size. Captchas are a solved problem. Commercial software exists that can solve Captchas automatically. You migrate from pay on demand services to computer vision software when it’s financially beneficial.
Computers are cheaper and better at solving Captchas than humans atm, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change any time soon. As long as you pay attention to your proxies, it’s rare to see solution attempts fail. Some pay on demand services no longer employ people.
