Lemmy

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Bots are trying to join my instance now through the application requirement (lemmyverse.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I have the application process enabled for people to join my instance, and I've gotten about 20 bots trying to join today when I had nobody trying to join for 5 days. I can tell because they are generic messages and I put a question in asking what 2+3 is and none of them have answered it at all, they just have a generic message.

Be careful out there, for all you small instance admins.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (18 children)

Why are these bot operators going through the hassle of joining existing instances... couldn't they just set up their own, since instances would need to manually defederate them after they spam?

I wonder how difficult it would be to take a Formspree-style approach to combat the bots, using a hidden form field

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I think the other user nailed it. It's easy to look at the list of lemmy servers and defederate the bot farms by comparing "active users" to "total users". I guess once the bots are active that will look a bit different.

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