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Introducing The Lemmy Overseer (overseer.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

44 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/95652

Hey everyone, you may have noticed that some of us have been raising alarms about the amount of spam accounts being created on insufficiently protected instances.

As I wanted to get ahead of this before we're shoulders deep in spam, I developed a small service which can be used to parse the Lemmy Fediverse Observer and retrieve instances which are suspicious enough to block.

The Overseer provides fully documented REST API which you can use to retrieve the instances in 3 different formats. One with all the info, one with just the names, and one as a csv you can copy-paste into your defederation setting. You can even adjust the level of suspicion you want to have.

Not only that, I also developed a python script which you can edit and run and it will automatically update your defederation list. You can set that baby to run on a daily schedule and it will take care that any new suspicious instances are also caught and any servers that cleared up their spam accounts will be recovered.

I plan to improve this service further. Feel free to send me ideas and PRs.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Looks like a very cool project, thanks for building it and sharing!

Based on the formula you mentioned here, it sounds like an instance with one user who has posted at least one comment will have a maximum score of 1. Presumably the threshold would usually be set to greater than 1, to catch instances with lots of accounts that have never commented.

This has given me another thought though: could spammers not just create one instance per spam account? If you own something like blah.xyz, you could in theory create ephemeral spam instances on subdomains and blast content out using those (e.g. [email protected], [email protected], etc.)

Spam management on the Fediverse is sure to become an interesting issue. I wonder how practical the instance blocking approach will be - I think eventually we'll need some kind of portable "user trustedness" score.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

yes, constantly adding new domains and spamming with them is a probably vector, but I'm not quite sure if that works due to how federation works. I am not quite that familiar with the implementations.