this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy

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I'm new to the fediverse, and so far, I have been seeing some situations from lemmy instances rejecting users to defederating from others, but I ask myself: what can be done if trolls or bots come from self-hosted single-user instances?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

They get defederated wherever they get consistently banned...and then they can federate with their friends and make their community of shit and yell at each other or something.

[โ€“] [email protected] -1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Can it be practical if several instances get created programmatically?

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Well, if we had a DDOS-like barrage of troll instances, probably a solution would be to institute a "pending federation request" for any new communities.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Looks interestsing.

Would it be also possible to ask for a captcha on the first interactions users from new instances make?

[โ€“] [email protected] -1 points 2 years ago

This should be the default in the next Lemmy version because otherwise it's only going to get easier for people to launch new instances and it's going to get too overwhelming

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I agree with Jamie. While it is certainly possible for a bad actor to spin up burner instances for the purposes of evading defederation, that's a disproportionate amount of effort compared to just creating a new account somewhere that already exists.

Will we see it happen? Probably. But it honestly seems easier to deal with than if those bad actors were to hide themselves in established instances.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I don't usually make a habit of being an ass, but I am extra careful about what I say because I choose to self host. Since any instance admin that decides not to take a liking to me could take one look at my instance and defederate me without a second thought. If anything, self-hosting makes you more vulnerable than just normally ban evading on an open instance.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Assuming you can block a top level domain and have it apply to all subdomains, doing so would force the troll to pay for another domain to get around the block. That could add up to quite the expense.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I'm not running an instance yet. If I do, I'd expect to drop any instance that seems to emit mostly junk, even if they sometimes emit non-junk.

It would be good to have tools that (for example) give instance admins an overview of what traffic they're receiving from various other instances.

Don't know if lemmy.buttgoats.com is good? You should be able to get a summary of all the traffic they have sent to others, and how much of it was removed by moderators.