cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/177673
Cross posting this here for visibility since lemmy.ml federation has been very hit or miss the last week. Original post from @sunaurus@lemm.ee
Today, a bunch of new instances appeared in the top of the user count list. It appears that these instances are all being bombarded by bot sign-ups.
For now, it seems that the bots are especially targeting instances that have:
- Open sign-ups
- No captcha
- No e-mail verification
I have put together a spreadsheet of some of the most suspicious cases here.
If this is affecting you, I would highly recommend considering one of the following options:
- Close sign-ups entirely
- Only allow sign-ups with applications
- Enable e-mail verification + captcha for sign-ups
Additionally, I would recommend pre-emptively banning as many bot accounts as possible, before they start posting spam!
Please comment below if you have any questions or anything useful to add.
Sadly, this may signal the end of open federation. I can’t see how trust by default is going to work long term.
It depends on how federated platforms react, it’s necessary to control who signs up in some way, if that’s “globally” accepted trust can hold well long term.
Right now the instances are working to stifle this by restricting account creation, but we’re just a step away from spammers creating instances on demand, flooding networks with stuff like the crypto spam on Reddit. I’m thinking major instances are going to have to go whitelist federation as a result.
I would not be surprised if at some point you have a few whitelists, or some kind of reputation management for instances. One could even say they can have a karma number associated to them.
In the end, this is the same problem as for emails and the landscape will probably structure itself around several big actors and countless of smaller actors who will have to be really careful in order to not be defederated.
A reputation system is really important. Open federation may not be viable long term without one.
That’s an interesting idea. For each instance give users the ability to mark as spam comments/posts, then make it so each instance keeps track of what the ratio of spam vs not-spam is coming from peer instances and block any that exceed a certain ratio. It could easily be made automatic with manual intervention for edge cases.
One issue I could see is that it could be used as a way of blacklisting smaller instances from larger instances by using bot accounts on the larger instances to mark the smaller instance’s legitimate traffic as spam. It would likely be necessary to implement a limit on how young/active an account can be to mark comments/posts as spam, as well as rate-limiting for situations where a given smaller community that is a subset of the larger one decides to dogpile on a smaller instance in an attempt to block them from the entire community.
This is one place where 2-of-3 multisig crypto could truly excel. If posters were required to have, say, $5 in XYZ per account per site, but that $5 will get you access to every site on the fediverse AND you can withdrawal it whenever you want, but it will close your accounts. Like a $5 participation escrow. Spammers could still spam, but they’d need to have $5 per account created to do so. I’m sure there are pros and cons to this, but it is technologically feasible.
You just described token gating, not multisig. Also you can do multisig without involving any money (or tokens)
My comment says deleted by creator (I didn’t delete it) so I don’t remember exactly what I said, but the point is to temporarily (as long as the account exists) put money on the books, which can be taken if you spam but you can withdrawal it when you close your account if you don’t. There would need to be a trusted signing authority so instance admins couldn’t just take it.