this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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The nice things about the Federated universe is that, yes, you can bulk create user accounts on your own instance - and that server can then be defederated by other servers when it becomes obvious that it's going to create problems.
It's not a perfect fix and as this post demonstrated, is only really effective after a problem has been identified. At least in terms of vote manipulation from across servers, it could act if it, say, detects that 99% of new upvotes are coming from a server created yesterday with 1 post, it could at least flag it for a human to review.
It actually seems like an interesting problem to solve. Instance runners have the sql database with all the voting record, finding manipulative instances seems a bit like a machine learning problem to me
There's an XKCD for that: https://xkcd.com/810/
Don't really need machine learning, just well built queries. Probably peak at the top pairs of users that comment on the same posts. If the same users are always commenting/voting on each other's posts across every subreddit, it points to manipulation.
One other thing is that you can bulk create your own instances, and that's a lot more effort to defederate. People could be creating those instances right now and just start using them after a year; at least they have incurred some costs during that..
I believe abuse management in openly federated systems (e.g. Lemmy, Mastodon, Matrix) is still an unsolved problem. I doubt good solutions will arrive before they become popular enough to attract commercial spammers.
Well if all the upvotes are coming from tiny instances, that'd be a good indicator. You can't stop it entirely, but you can at least make it a lot harder. I do wish that instances could've been somewhat more "randomly" assigned to new users, as that would make any bias in voting sources a huge and obvious red flag.
Then they will just distribute their bots equally to other legit servers, and by that, defederation is not a viable solution anymore.
One other problem are real human troll farms
If they can do that, they could've done it on a traditional site anyway
"Legit" instances are able to moderate/control the spam coming from their users.