Great to see the transparency with which this is handled
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The transparency may be my very favorite part of Lemmy. It's almost feels like these people are invested in it's success instead of it's profit.
It's a very early internet mindset where success == profit.
Those are crazy numbers... WTF?
If that's is the reality for Lemmy, I couldn't imagine the number of bots giants social networks have. Crazy.
Thank you for your work.
That's the thing, right? Those giant networks' admins surely know how inflated their userbase is. They surely know that a lot of the activity is bot faked/manipulated.
But since the end goal of those networks is generate traffic to sell something (ads, user data), they never purge the bots. They need fake engagement. They might even promote it. The human user is just being used (Cf. Stallman's use of this term).
I work on a team that runs the web presence for a very large international music label and we postulate that 75-80% of all traffic we do at any time is bots, crawlers, and security scans. With caching in place most of the time our system hums along quite happy. It's only when we get an influx of ACTUAL people do things go south. [Max database connections, firewall usage pegs and stops responding, edge nginx process OOMs itself, ect.]
I want to celebrate two things. 1. Your awareness of the potential dangers looming over the fediverse. 2. Your proactive attitude curtailing the problem at its root. From one human to another, thank you!
Very nice, let's try to keep this place as clean as possible
Thank you for your work!
Thank you for your efforts to keep this place clean and civil, and especially for the transparency in describing how you've dealt with such annoyances. You have my respect.
If the women don't find you handsome, they'll at least find you handy.
- Red Green
Found the Canadian eh?
WOOO!
Thanks for keeping Lemmy healthy. ❤️
Amazing and thank you!
actual humans interact, rather than a cesspool of automated comments and upvote/downvote brigading.
Thank you! That's why I left the other place. You're doing God's work, anon.
I don't think I've ever upvoted something more enthusiastically in my life.
Cheers and thank you.
Unfortunately no website is safe from the cancer of AI/bots. The Internet is truly in trouble.
Thank you for your service. o7
Can you link to a process for purging bot accounts?
Well done. I for one appreciate the effort you're putting into making this a better place by keeping the bots out. Any thoughts on what can be done to keep bots from signing up to begin with or is the plan to continuously purge inactive accounts? I know from experience that a lot of these bad actors are going to pivot and redouble their efforts. This is unfortunately a cat and mouse game that will continually need to be addressed. But, again, thank you for your work on this!
Instances should enable verification to create accounts (email or captcha). I think everyone learned that pretty quickly last month. Other than that, it's up to users to diligently flag content and moderators to be responsive. Maybe there are good automod tools coming to Lemmy someday, but those are an arms race, too.
Awesome work, and thank you for all of this it is appreciated!
Suggestion: what if there was a lemmy instance solely for reporting malicious lemmy/fediverse servers? I've read some stuff about FBI crackdown and mastodon instances containing questionable material. Wouldn't it be gret to have some kind of federated "registry" of all the bad actors out there? I am pretty clueless, but would that help?
What are qualifications for being an active account? I didn't see any details in the other thread about it either. Is it just post/comment creation? Is it page views? Log ins? Does voting up or down register an account as Active?
If it's only post/comments then you're possibly deleting a bunch of lurkers too.
Looks like a bunch of personal instances that forgot to turn off self-registration. The down ones likely crumbled under the load
That's actually really interesting. What's the purpose of so many inactive accounts at once?
Seems to be enough to have a few of them, and not a million accounts since it clearly will rise suspicion... :)
Very good that you found them. Fascinating.
What’s the purpose of so many inactive accounts at once?
That really is the million dollar question. I don't know. My fear is that they were intended to sit unnoticed until someone had a malicious use for them. Maybe to mass upvote/downvote certain content to make it more visible. Or to become active at an opportune time to make divisive posts and comments. I saw many accounts like that on Reddit; they show no activity for years and then suddenly come alive and spew garbage. I'm sure we'll see some of that on Lemmy next year since there will be a major election in the US. Though hopefully less since a bunch of suspicious dormant accounts are now gone.
It's a smart move for a spammer to create a lot of accounts in the early days of a platform, before more restrictive signups with mail verification, phone verification or captchas are in place. Look at how difficult it has become to register on Twitter or Facebook.
Who needs fraudulent/abuse accounts anyway. I have moved to lemmy and am here to stay!
Thanks for the work!
How did those accounts get created in the 1st place? Arent there captchas? Or are there ways around that? Strong captcha system should he implemented in lemmy by default
Captchas are a low bar to modern standards. All the advancements in AI are a problem for captchas. Machine vision tools have become abundant and simple. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what more you can do except require human review of access.
Does Lemmy have a way to link to a post that anyone can use?
I can click the links up there, but it takes me to sh.itjust.works and that's not where I am in the Fediverse, so when I get there I'm no longer logged in.
And if so, can we have it so "wrong" links are corrected into the right format?
Nice work!
Should the instances that responded to you be refederrated? I’m pretty sure I saw some of them on lemmy.world’s block list. I think it would be sad for these small servers to not realize they are, in fact, not connected to the greater fediverse. On the other hand, if you’re an admin, and you don’t know what you’re doing to the point of not knowing your server was infected by hundreds of thousands of bots, maybe it’s too dangerous to refed.
Everyone has to start somewhere. We should reward honest effort instead of punishing honest effort but ignorance.
We need to find a way to get indexed on Google, Duckduckgo and other search engines.
Probably happening to some degree already, unless no robots is checked. No way lemmy jumps as high as reddit in seo for random things for a long while
When an account is signed up, is there information such as client ip address that could also be used to spot more inauthentic activity? And more generally, sign up should probably be made resistant to automated bots by randomizing HTML layout & ids and using captchas so it's not so easy to drive sign up through scripts.
Support 100%
Thanks so much absolutely amazing stuff
Thanks dude