See THIS POST
Notice- the 2,000 upvotes?
https://gist.github.com/XtremeOwnageDotCom/19422927a5225228c53517652847a76b
It's mostly bot traffic.
Important Note
The OP of that post did admit, to purposely using bots for that demonstration.
I am not making this post, specifically for that post. Rather- we need to collectively organize, and find a method.
Defederation is a nuke from orbit approach, which WILL cause more harm then good, over the long run.
Having admins proactively monitor their content and communities helps- as does enabling new user approvals, captchas, email verification, etc. But, this does not solve the problem.
The REAL problem
But, the real problem- The fediverse is so open, there is NOTHING stopping dedicated bot owners and spammers from...
- Creating new instances for hosting bots, and then federating with other servers. (Everything can be fully automated to completely spin up a new instance, in UNDER 15 seconds)
- Hiring kids in africa and india to create accounts for 2 cents an hour. NEWS POST 1 POST TWO
- Lemmy is EXTREMELY trusting. For example, go look at the stats for my instance online.... (lemmyonline.com) I can assure you, I don't have 30k users and 1.2 million comments.
- There is no built-in "real-time" methods for admins via the UI to identify suspicious activity from their users, I am only able to fetch this data directly from the database. I don't think it is even exposed through the rest api.
What can happen if we don't identify a solution.
We know meta wants to infiltrate the fediverse. We know reddits wants the fediverse to fail.
If, a single user, with limited technical resources can manipulate that content, as was proven above-
What is going to happen when big-corpo wants to swing their fist around?
Edits
- Removed most of the images containing instances. Some of those issues have already been taken care of. As well, I don't want to distract from the ACTUAL problem.
- Cleaned up post.
The beehaw approach wasn't "bulk defederation". They blocked two Lemmy instances they were having trouble with. The bulk of their block list are Mastodon and Pleroma instances well known for trolling other sites and stirring up shit.
Edit: Autocomplete refuses to accept that I talk a lot about federation and defederating, and is desperately trying to convince me I'm talking about anything else that states with "de".
https://beehaw.org/instances
While- the majority of their instances do appear to be potentially quite noisy/potentially bad- there are quite a few, very large, well known instances on their defederation list.
For example- a percentage of the individual IN THIS THREAD, are on instances defederated from beehaw.
I didn't say they blocked few people. I said they blocked few websites.
Lemmygrad is full of agitators, and Lemmy.world and SJW have, from my experiences, a disproportionate number of people who reject communal solutions to communal issues, while still feeling entitled to access to communal spaces.
Meanwhile, other large sites, like Lemmy.ml and kbin.social, and smaller regional sites, such as Midwest.social, Lemmy.ca, and feddit.uk, are federation with them just fine.
That doesn't sound like mass defederating to me.
That sounds targeted.