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 1POST 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The people doing the development seem to have zero concern that their all the major servers are crashing with nginx 500 errors on their front page under routine moderate loads, nothing close to a major website. There is no concern to alert operators of internal federation failures, etc.
I am only able to fetch this data directly from the database.
I too had to resort to this, and published an open source tool - primitive and non-elegant, to try and get something out there for server operators: !lemmy_helper@lemmy.ml
I think that one of the most difficult things to deal with more common bots, spamming, reposting, etc.
Is that parsing all the commentary and dealing with it on a service wide level is really hard to do, in terms of computing power and sheer volume of content. Seems to me that do this on an instance level with user numbers in the 10's of thousands is a heck of a lot more reasonable than doing it on a 10's of millions of users service.
What I'm getting at is that this really seems like something that could (maybe even should) be built into the instance moderation tools, at least some method of marking user activity as suspicious for further investigation by human admins/mods.
We're really operating on the assumption that people spinning up instances are acting in good faith, until they prove that they aren't, I think the first step is giving good faith actors the tools to moderate effectively, then worrying about bad faith admins.
Reposting this in comment from a reply elsewhere in the thread.
If anything there should be SOME centralization that allows other (known, somehow verified) instances to vote to disallow spammy instances from federating. In some way that couldn't be abused. This may lead to a fork down the road (think BTC vs BCH) due to community disagreements but I don't really see any other way this doesn't become an absolute spamfest. As it stands now one server admin could spamfest their own server with their own spam, and once it starts federating EVERYONE gets flooded. This also easily creates a DoS of the system.
Asking instance admins to require CAPTCHA or whatever to defeat spam doesn't work when the instance admins are the ones creating spam servers to spam the federation.
I really hope that some researchers will get interested into this and develop some cool solutions to this. Maybe we are lucky and they even implement them into Lemmy.
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.