I've heard many people lamenting defederation. Mindful defederation is an extremely important tool to prevent abuse, both by malicious actors and by corporate interests ("They're the same picture"), especially in this time of rapid fediverse expansion. It is important for instance operators to understand that "If you don't play nice, you will be forced to sit in the corner." Demonstrating the consequences of "not playing nice" will sort out not only the present issues with bot accounts, but also act as a warning to other instances and potential instances.

Rather than lamenting defederation, I believe that mindful defederation should be applied with some haste, at least for now. As you mentioned, it does not have to be permanent. It's like a nuclear bomb that you can unexplode.

Thank you for always being at the forefront of the fight against problems that affect Lemmt. I'm glad I chose this instance as my home.

I know the situation really sucks, but I'm really glad I happened to join an instance with such a competent host. Not just decisions like this but also your approach to the infrastructure.

Thanks for all your ongoing efforts, and transparency with the community.

Thank you for being proactive and defending the health of the community.
I really appreciate the open and clear communication.

I don’t know enough about how Lemmy works to offer suggestions, but I’ll try to bone up soon and see if I can offer suggestions.

Excellent work and thank you for being transparent in your decision. I think it was the right call and I appreciate your work on contributing to the Lemmy code base.

That's exactly how I would do it!

Thanks for all the hard work your putting on this. Initially I thought that running an instance would pretty much have monetary cost only and not much time invested after things were set up. But looks like this is consuming your time as much as a full time job, all to make our experience better. Thanks a lot

I think this is a good idea.. Some instances don’t seem to take action and are growing quickly!

I’m gonna do the same on Geddit to be sure 👌🏻🥰

I just want to take this opportunity to say - I'm a real person! :)

Thanks for the heads up on that. Initially I thought defederation was a bad thing as in admins deciding for me what content I can and can not have access to. Now I see it's a necessary evil in preventing exploitation by spammers and bots. Thanks for staying on top of this and preserving instance quality.

It would be nice to see some kind of federation council (for lack of a better phrase) that could vet the inception of new instances. Would really take the load off admins in ferreting out the bad ones.

It's pretty darn interesting that instead of an entire site having to deal with spam issues, you can simply cut them off the back of the train before they latch onto you! And the future of Lemmy is easily gonna be based on safe sign-in instances and bots are merely gonna push people to that. All solvable with time and proper responses like this in this changing age.

I'm so glad I chose this instance, keep up the fantastic work.

this seems like a reasonably measured response. thanks sunaurus

I just want to say thanks for working on this issue!

I have signed up for and evaluated many lemmy instances and ended up choosing this as my main.

I think I made the right choice given your thoughtful process and work for the users of this instance.

Thanks!

Spam has long been the corrosion eating away at internet services. It killed Usenet, and nearly did email.

I fully approve of the decisions.

Can you share what these bots are spamming about (the topic), so that the community is aware that discussion of the said topic might not be fully organic?

Completely unrelated, but lemmys.ee would be a great instance domain name.

Can we have a public, continuously updated list of communities we are defederated from?

Thank you for doing this. I have been watching the user stats, and it's very clear which instances are being targeted.

Defederation should only be considered when there is a potential for serious damage to the community. Given the volume of spambots (there are a few small instances with >10,000 new "users"), defederation is the right solution in these cases. No amount of extra mods can help delete comments from tens of thousands of spambots. If it's a more manageable number of bad actors, then defederation should not be used (looking at you, beehaw).

I don't know if you want to comment publicly, but I remember seeing some discussion with the lemmy devs over implementation of captcha. Was that resolved?

Thanks so much for publishing your findings re: spambot-afflicted instances. Even though I'm from kbin, this should mean lemm.ee's actions will help improve the rest of the threadiverse, too.

Couldn't help but think that the big social media like FB Or ReddIt might be behind such spam attacks.

spez ordering these spambots to target lemmy because he thinks that the new users will be more likely to get back to reddit in these conditions 😂

I was thinking the other day what purpose does defederating serve? I tend to maintain a neutral stance when it comes things. Lately have learned of a few negative reasons for defederating, was wondering what are the positive aspects? With your efforts you have showed me. Thanks for letting us know and for your efforts ☺️

Thanks for the communication, sounds like a solid plan. Do you have an opinion on the removal of captcha for Lemmy v .18?

I agree with this entirely. Defed the instances that are allowing spam to rise. They will bring all the other instances down if no action is taken. This is all part of natural selection.

Given the tools that we have currently, this seems like the best approach. Still, defederation feels like using a nuke to handle a pest problem, which I think will be especially apparent once bots start appearing on more established instances where defederation will have more apparent consequences. It seems like you're working towards a better solution, can you share anything about what you're planning? (Without giving any tips to bad actors about evasion, obviously)

Personally, I'm wondering if there could be a way for an instance with bot filters to put users on other instances through similar filters before allowing the users to use/post in their communities. Like, for example a user from a tiny instance might have to do a captcha to get post/comment access on a lemm.ee community, while a beehah user could be auto whitelisted since the same thing isn't a problem on their instance. It would obviously take some overhauls to the community filters/join process, but I feel like it could be feasible

I fully support this.

Thank you, this is exactly the kind of action we need. I have started building a small instance and have controls in place, so fortunately I haven't yet been impacted. But I expect the spammers will start hitting the instances with controls once the easy targets dry up. I'll be updating my blocklist periodically with the data you're publishing.

Thank you! I feel so informed & connected to this community, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your hard work & taking fast action against spam bots.

I’m sure a captcha would stop all bots. They are robots so they won’t press on the “I’m not a robot” prompt 😎😎😎 easy fix

Here I am, struggling to set up an instance trying to make sense of the documentation that's not complete, meanwhile people who successfully are running an instance, don't take good care of them. SMH.

Sounds sensible. Lemmy is going to have a rough time as reddit burns, if people come on mass the current growth rate is only going to look small by comparison. Using the tools federation gives you seems to be the right way to handle it.