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Introducing The Lemmy Overseer (overseer.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

48 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/95652

Hey everyone, you may have noticed that some of us have been raising alarms about the amount of spam accounts being created on insufficiently protected instances.

As I wanted to get ahead of this before we're shoulders deep in spam, I developed a small service which can be used to parse the Lemmy Fediverse Observer and retrieve instances which are suspicious enough to block.

The Overseer provides fully documented REST API which you can use to retrieve the instances in 3 different formats. One with all the info, one with just the names, and one as a csv you can copy-paste into your defederation setting. You can even adjust the level of suspicion you want to have.

Not only that, I also developed a python script which you can edit and run and it will automatically update your defederation list. You can set that baby to run on a daily schedule and it will take care that any new suspicious instances are also caught and any servers that cleared up their spam accounts will be recovered.

I plan to improve this service further. Feel free to send me ideas and PRs.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

What about people like me who host an instance just for themselves, but don't have any communities in their own instance? What's the risk for me for getting blacklisted? I didn't find an clear answer by looking at the source code.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I assume the sus score would remain low, it seems to be looking for high number of accounts with extremely low posts and no/open registration

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

You have one user and has many comments and post as you make yourself. This means that your suspicion score is going to be extremely low (under .5 if you post 2 times on any server).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Feels like an instance per bot would be pretty wasteful, so single user instances shouldn't be considered suspicious. But maybe it's more scalable than I'd think.