Administrative actions taken by the Pawb.Social Admin team across our Mastodon and Lemmy instances.
CW: Some instance URLs may contain disturbing, offensive, or adult material.
Huh…. Something I hadn’t considered until now about the Fediverse, are these single-user instances.
Theoretically they could keep making new ones to troll or harass, right? Is there anything to be done preventatively? Or is it more keeping an eye out and defederating as needed?
You need a domain name to run a Fediverse instance, which costs money, which should hopefully be enough of a deterrent.
For admins out there, does Lemmy support "wildcard" defederations like *.federated.fun?
I don't think Lemmy does, but I believe Mastodon does.
Typically, there isn't much we can do to handle abusive single-user instances preemptively as anything that was added to combat that would most likely also affect legitimate single-user instances. Currently, we've just keeping an eye out, checking to see if they federate with "the usual suspects", or if their posting history is just full of trolling, hate speech, or other content that would result in a user-specific suspension.
I guess getting your one-user instance defed would be equivalent to getting banned. You make a new instance just like you would make a new account.
This got me thinking, how plausible is a single-user instance? I have been debating running my own instance, and if I could add some of the things that are not plausible for an instance of any actual size that would be nice.
How ironic.