this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
115 points (96.0% liked)
Meta (lemm.ee)
3473 readers
3 users here now
lemm.ee Meta
This is a community for discussion about this particular Lemmy instance.
News and updates about lemm.ee will be posted here, so if that's something that interests you, make sure to subscribe!
Rules:
- Support requests belong in !support
- Only posts about topics directly related to lemm.ee are allowed
- If you don't have anything constructive to add, then do not post/comment here. Low effort memes, trolling, etc is not allowed.
- If you are from another instance, you may participate in discussions, but remain respectful. Realize that your comments will inevitably be associated with your instance by many lemm.ee users.
If you're a Discord user, you can also join our Discord server: https://discord.gg/XM9nZwUn9K
Discord is only a back-up channel, [email protected] will always be the main place for lemm.ee communications.
If you need help with anything, please post in !support instead.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yesss and around 800K are spam accounts.. :(
Also a way to harvest personal data and passwords, and drive traffic to instances.
New users tend to register with the busiest servers. So, start your own instance, flood it with fake users to get to the top of the rankings. Tweak Lemmy to store passwords instead of hashes. Allow open registration, sit back and wait for people to sign up with their emails and potentially-reused passwords.
Ranking instances by number of users drives undesirable behaviours all-round.
I guess this is a potential disadvantage to decentralization. With a centralized site, the owner would have a vested interest in the security of the site because culpability for stolen passwords or other nefarious things would fall back to them. Here, with a decentralized model, instance owners can manipulate the particular instance to not match others and do nefarious things. Up to now I had only heard of the benefits of decentralization and hadn't thought of this. Food for thought perhaps. All it takes is a few or even one nefarious instance (if its bad enough) to spoil the general public's thought on this model.