A dev initially suggested in the Lemmy GitHub to remove captchas from future releases altogether because "they're easy to bypass".
Here's the thing though, the lemmy.world instance avoided the daily 10k+ bot signups per day the other instances are currently experiencing simply by activating captchas.
Yes basic OCR easily bypasses them, but the whole point is that you're forcing the spammer to use it, and it costs CPU resources, meaning that for the same budget the spammer will be able to create LESS bot accounts, or none at all if he doesn't know how to automate the use of an OCR. Compare that with the current situation where anyone who followed a Python crash course can easily write a small script doing tens of thousands of automated signups using just the requests module.
Please enable captchas by default in future releases. You can try out other proposed solutions like hashcash too but IMO focus on the low hanging fruit first and make captchas a default in 0.18 already. One barrier, no matter how weak it is, is much better than no barrier at all.
And to those who maintain websites that list instances and rank them by size, you are also contributing to this problem by adding an incentive for bad actors to inflate their own instances. Please either remove that ranking, or remove the spammy looking instances by hand.
Also, maybe change the user count such that only users having clicked on the verification link are counted.
Completely agree, captcha's aren't gonna make it impossible to make bots, but it makes it more complicated. It will force bad actors to invest more time in it. Wich will turn some part of them away.
On a positive note, I think the fact that we see so many bot signups shows lemmy (the fediverse in general) is growing and matters, otherwise people wouldn't spend so much time and resources to make these bots. All big platforms have these kind of problems and need to learn how to deal with them.
There's also an active Issue about replacing captchas (which are often an issue privacy-wise) with a mCaptcha, where you computer does "Bitcoin-Like" useless calculations which the server easily can verify that you did.
So it would be much more costly to make a billion spam accounts
I'm very skeptical that mCaptcha would actually work besides perhaps temporarily slowing bots down due to being niche. How expensive can you make it without hurting legitimate users? And how expensive does it need to be to discourage bots? Especially when purposefully designed bots can actually do the kinda math we're talking about in optimized software and hardware while legitimate users can't.
Yes, but the point is that and captchas are not exclusive. I hope devs will backtrack on their intention to remove captchas and instead make them a default.
If you add a delay the botters will just run more requests in parallel. It is a tiny barrier but in a completely different league than even a simple captcha.
@kevincox@fubo I've tried actually shunting the bots into a queue that basically sets the TCP receive window to 1. You're quite correct, the bots just spawn off more processes.
Hard agree.. currently of the top 20 fastest growing servers in the fediverse most are instances with less than 10 active users but they are showing 50k - 70k bot accounts.
I'd say setting registrations to closed and having the operator enable/configure which to use is the best default. CAPTCHAs can also be automated, so this won't stop anyone that is ambitious enough. If someone sees value in automating account registrations, they might be willing to pay for the CAPTCHAs to be solved for fraction of a US cent each.
Agreed, I'm really concerned about the fact that email verification and captchas are available but off by default. With the state of the internet now they really should be on by default.