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.
    • towerful@beehaw.org
      5·
      2 years ago

      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 content

      • HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.comOP
        3·
        2 years ago

        Give 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.

    • yesdogishere@kbin.social
      211·
      2 years ago

      how about going through the 4chan approach of nobody cares, everybody spams whatever they like? then the corpos can wallow in their own poo?