There have been a number of comment spam attacks in various posts in a couple of /c’s that I follow by a user/individual who uses account names like Thulean*
For example: [email protected] in [email protected]
and [email protected] in [email protected]
edit: Also [email protected] in [email protected]
The posts have been removed or deleted by the respective /c’s mods, and the offending accounts banned, but you can see the traces of them in those /c’s modlogs.
The comments consist of an all-caps string of words with profanities, and Simpsons memes.
An attack on a post may consist of several repeated or similar looking comments.
This looks like a bored teenager prank, but it may also be an organization testing Lemmy’s systemic and collective defenses and ability to respond against spam and bot posts.
A lot of this stems from instances running old versions with loose registration requirements, like no captcha. This is a problem in a federated system because there’s no barrier for a banned user to just jump to another instance.
Perhaps it would be a good idea if, when Lemmy has anti-spam measures implemented like rate-limiting and captchas for registration, it disabled federation with instances that are at a lower version, to motivate small instances to upgrade and enable the new features.
What I really want to see is the ability to set a threshold for a server to reach before it will federate.
Example: you have a server, you don’t allow others to federate unless those servers force captcha or approval of user registration
The problem is that a server could very easily lie and claim to have captchas when it really doesnt.