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…
- 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 1 POST 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.
- Cleaned up post.
If Twitter can’t avoid bots how will the fediverse avoid it, using some captcha maybe?
Captchas are mostly obsolete from stopping dedicated bots. And even then, they pay child labor to solve captchas for them.
Completely stopping bots, I don’t think will ever be possible.
But- the fediverse in its current state, is entirely too vulnerable to low skill attacks.
The only thing I can think of, which would probably be wildly unpopular, is ID checking.
Or perhaps SMS based 2FA on each account, which needs to be reconfirmed monthly?
Perhaps also rate limiting per account.
That feel pretty much the only way you can easily filter bot out.
The best ID to check would be a government ID or a bank account ID. The gov/bank are absolutely crazy about making sure that someone is really someone.
Unfortunately, this is incompatible with anonymity, unless we trust the instance admin.
I really like the SMS thing.