this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
75 points (88.7% liked)

Technology

59414 readers
3374 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

It seems this community is being targeted by ad bots. I see all of them come from a @szmer.info instance (or?). Maybe it should be banned?

top 19 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Mod from [email protected] here.

We're currently trying to get in contact with them to maybe help and sort out the spam issue. (Link)

Saw the post here and thought I'll drop my 2 cents.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

since it's a a smaller polish instance i'm not sure they're even aware that they are hosting bots and defederation should be the very last resort, so i's good the kbin team is reaching out.

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

The lemmy.world team, right? Unless they're both doing it

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Definitely, it can redeferated once the admins purge the bots

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There could be some communication issues there since szmer looks like a Polish instance, hopefully things can get worked out. Tired of seeing the throwaway ad accounts...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I've made a post on their meta community ( [email protected] ), hopefully an admin will see it and will take care of the situation.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unfortunately this isn’t an action that mods can take. The admins of each instance need to de-federate from it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I see, I didn't know about that, thank you. May I ask: is the instance where the community is hosted that should do this, or the instance(s) of the subscribers?

Please feel free to delete my post if it's pointless then!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I’m not actually sure how that works. If LW defederates does it block all users from that instance from posting? I would guess “yes” in that I believe the instance the community is hosted on plays a role in tracking posts to that community. If you’re curious, I would definitely ask one of the dev communities.

Will leave up for a little since I’m sure a lot of other people saw the barrage of spam from last night. Should be all cleaned up now.

Also, I do believe that is a legit instance, so it’s not likely it’ll be defederated, they’re likely a victim of the spammers as much as we are here… they just need to delete those accounts and block those IPs.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They are still running 18.1, I'm not sure how actively managed the instance is

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

Ouch, that’s definitely way out of date and has several critical bugs in it that are unpatched.

I brought the spam issue from that instance to the attention of the admins for LW, they’re going to take a look into it. Will keep an eye out for more spamming today.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Anything other than the custom emoji one? We're one of the oldest instances, running with limited resources and update when we either have the time and energy for that, or when we have to.

As for spam: we block spam accounts from other instances before their own mods nearly daily, including from the biggest ones. Chill.

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

It is, to the point of developing it's own deployment system to be able to run lemmy on bare metal in a way we see fit, as opposed to the unpredictable cycle and frustrating process of using the main packages.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Absolutely, don't take my post too literally as I'm not very acquainted with the Fediverse yet :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's a one way street, defederating from them means users here won't see the spam posts, but the users there will see the rest of the posts.

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

But non-spammy regular users wouldn’t be able to post or interact at that point, right? Also, how would that affect users on a third party instance? For example, I’m on lemm.ee

Genuine question, not too familiar with how the backend of Lemmy works and am curious to learn more :)

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

Take this with a grain of salt since im also not very fammiliar with the lemmy backend, but i think it would be like this:

If lemmy.world defederates from szmer.info all users from szmer (both spammers and normal users) would be able to see and comment on posts made on lemmy.world BUT those comments would only show up for other users on szmer.

For users on other instances (like lemm.ee) the situation would be the same as for users on lemmy.world .

Again im not an expert so this might be wrong (if it is feel free to correct me).

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

That's how I had hoped it would work. So if it continues, just one instance can clean it up so all the others don't need to take any action.

Probably the easiest solution. Just had to remove another one, guess we'll see what happens.