Fediverse

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founded 2 years ago

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PSA: Many Lemmy instances are currently experiencing massive automated sign-ups (bots)! If you run an instance with open sign-ups, please read! (zemmy.cc)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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 @[email protected]

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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Sadly, this may signal the end of open federation. I can't see how trust by default is going to work long term.

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

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.

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

This is a really interesting approach to this!

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