Please. Captcha by default. Email domain filters. Auto-block federation from servers that don’t respect. By default. Urgent.
And yes, to refute some comments, this publication is being upvoted by bots. A single computer was needed, not “thousands of dollars” spent.
Sigh…
All of those ideas are bad.
- Captchas are already pretty weak to combat bots. It’s why recaptcha and others were invented. The people who run bots, spend lots of money for their bots to… bot. They have accessed to quite advanced modules for decoding captchas. As well, they pay kids in india and africa pennies to just create accounts on websites.
I am not saying captchas are completely useless, they do block the lowest hanging fruit currently. That- being most of the script kiddies.
- Email domain filters.
Issue number one, has already been covered below/above by others. You can use a single gmail account, to basically register an unlimited number of accounts.
Issue number two. Spammers LOVE to use office 365 for spamming. Most of the spam I find, actually comes from *.onmicrosoft.com inboxes. its quick for them to spin it up on a trial, and by the time the trial is over, they have moved to another inbox.
- Autoblocking federation for servers who don’t follow the above two broken rules
This is how you destroy the platform. When you block legitimate users, the users will think the platform is broken. Because, none of their comments are working. They can’t see posts properly.
They don’t know this is due to admins defederating servers. All they see, is broken content.
At this time, your best option is for admin approvals, combined with keeping tabs on users.
If you notice an instance is offering spammers. Lets- use my instance for example- I have my contact information right on the side-bar, If you notice there is spam, WORK WITH US, and we will help resolve this issue.
I review my reports. I review spam on my instance. None of us are going to be perfect.
There are very intelligent people who make lots of money creating “bots” and “spam”. NOBODY is going to stop all of it.
The only way to resolve this, is to work together, to identify problems, and take action.
Nuking every server that doesn’t have captcha enabled, is just going to piss off the users, and ruin this movement.
One possible thing that might help-
Is just to be able to have an easy listing of registered users in a server. I noticed- that actually… doesn’t appear to be easily accessible, without hitting rest apis or querying the database.
This is all 100% correct. People have already written captcha-bypassing bots for lemmy, we know from experience.
The only way to stop bots, is the way that has worked for forums for years: registration applications. At lemmy.ml we historically have blocked any server that doesn’t have them turned on, because of the likelihood of bot infiltration from them.
Registration applications have 100% stopped bots here.
You’re right that captchas can be bypassed, but I disagree that they’re useless.
Do you lock your house? Are you aware that most locks can be picked and windows can be smashed?
captchas can be defeated, but that doesn’t mean they’re useless - they increase the level of friction required to automate malicious activity. Maybe not a lot, but along with other measures, it may make it tricky enough to circumvent that it discourages a good percentage of bot spammers. It’s the “Swiss cheese” model of security.
Registration applications stop bots, but it also stops legitimate users. I almost didn’t get onto the fediverse because of registration applications. I filled out applications at lemmy.ml and beehaw.org, and then forgot about it. Two days later, I got reminded of the fediverse, and luckily I found this instance that didn’t require some sort of application to join.
Don’t read the first sentence, and then glaze over the rest.
I am not saying captchas are completely useless, they do block the lowest hanging fruit currently. That- being most of the script kiddies.
chatgpt.
Despite all the hype about these things being able to solve all the worlds problems, they can’t answer a series of contextual questions.
Boom. Roasted.
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“are you human?"
Heh, stupid AI can’t even be more smarter than me
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Btw, what’s the deal with your instance? I noticed you’re from one of the original servers from 4 years ago. Do you know why it was founded or can you direct me to some information?
I’m from the reddit migration, although a bit more experienced than most (having been here over 2 weeks makes me a unicorn on my server).
I’d like to spread some more knowledge among my fellow newbies about the history of the platform and what kind of different servers are out there. Problem is, I don’t have any knowledge! Help!
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Ah, I see. So tchncs.de hosts other federated platforms, and someone probably decided to set up a Lemmy site when it was originally created 4 years ago. But it was likely pretty empty until the past couple weeks.
Ok good to know, I don’t really know about XMPP/Jabber but I like what I see on wikipedia. Thanks!
Haven’t you heard of the “Swiss cheese” model of security?
The best way to ensure your server is protected is to unplug it from the Internet and put it in an EMF-shielded Faraday cage.
There’s always a tradeoff between security, usability and cost.
captchas can be defeated, but that doesn’t mean they’re useless - they increase the level of friction required to automate malicious activity. Maybe not a lot, but along with other measures, it may make it tricky enough to circumvent that it discourages a good percentage of bot spammers.
I disagree. I think the solution is moderation. Basically, have a set of tools that identify likely bots, and let human moderators make the call.
If you require admins to manually approve accounts, admins will either automate approvals or stop approving. That’s just how people tend to operate imo. And the more steps you put between people wanting to sign up and actually getting an account, the fewer people you’ll get to actually go through with it.
So I’m against applications. What we need is better moderation tools. My ideal would be a web of trust. Basically, you get more privileges the more trusted people that trust you. I think that should start from the admins, then to the mods, and then to regular users.
But lemmy isn’t that sophisticated. Maybe it will be some day, IDK, but it’s the direction I’d like to see things go.
As someone with his own email domain, screw you for even thinking about suggesting domain filters.
Blacklist domain filters are fine, it’s whitelist domain filters that get small personal domains.
Thank you for voicing this out! Was literally my first reaction as well
This. Domain whitelist are the worse thing you can do.
I second this
Lemmy is just getting started and way too many people are talking about defederation for any reason possible. What is even the point of a federated platform if everyone’s trying to defederate? If you don’t like federation so much, go use Facebook or something.
My understanding from the beehaw defed is that more surgical moderation tools just don’t exist right now (and likely won’t for awhile unless the two Lemmy devs get some major help). Admins only really have a singular nuclear option to deal with other instances that aren’t able to tackle the bot problem.
Personally I don’t see defederating as a bad thing. People and instances are working through who they want to be in their social network. The well managed servers will eventually rise to the top with the bot infested and draconian ones eventually falling into irrelevance.
As a user this will result in some growing pains since Lemmy currently doesn’t offer a way to migrate your account. Personally I already have 3 Lemmy accounts. A good app front end that minimizes the friction from account switching would greatly help these growing pains.
This. Defed is not the magic weapon that will solve all your problems. Captcha and email filters should be on by default though.
Just to add to that, imagine people would start defeding email. Like WTF is that even? Defed should not even be an option.
imagine people would start defeding email
There are literally globally maintained blacklists of spam email sources. When people lease a static IP address the first thing to do is to check it against the major email blacklists.
It happens to email ALL THE TIME, we just call it something different when it happens to email. Evaluating email for SPAM potential is an every-day common place occurrence, and for at least the past 10 years, a factor called ‘domain reputation’ is part of the equation. Entire domains get spam blacklisted because they refuse to enforce rules for their users. The end result is that some domains completely refuse to accept mail from some other domains.
Blacklisting an entire domain can and does happen daily. It just doesn’t have the same triggering ring as the word “defederation” has.
It happens because spam is illegal in many countries.
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Use Facebook then. Or Reddit.
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Again, go use Facebook or Reddit. They will suit your needs and wishes.
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Lemmy.world has rules that are up on https://mastodon.world/about - if posts from other instances do not follow these rules the posts will be deleted and if needed the user will be warned/banned. If there is an entire instance that might be a problem, they might ultimately become defederated. Yes this is the last option, but sometimes it’s also the only option. Mod and admin tools are quite limited currently and there’s just some content we don’t want to be linked with.
Read more about the defederation of exploding-heads.com here: https://lemmy.world/post/747912
EH was not defederated because it broke LW rules, it was defeded because it breaks laws. Defeding a porn instance because LW doesn’t allow porn won’t happen. Defeding a child porn instance will happen for sure.
You shouldn’t defed some instance because their rules are different, because all rules are different. That will destroy fediverse before it starts. Everyone who disagrees simply doesn’t understand the point of Fediverse.
Did you read that post? I don’t think you did because that explains the entire reasoning why it was defederated. Had nothing to do with them breaking the law.
Ok, I guess you’re from Belgium. Tell me one thing - is racism legal in Belgium? Because EH is clearly supporting and endorsing racism. That alone makes it illegal. At least here in the UK. There’s no need to invent some explanation for this specific case.
So because the rules we put on lemmy.world also match with laws - it’s because of the laws we decided to not federate with them? Not because we don’t want to deal with that kind of people in general? Because we personally don’t like bigots, racists and homophobes? And it wasn’t because we didn’t want to give them a platform here? Cool, I didn’t know.
Image Transcription: Meme
[‘Man vs. Giant’ - Dramatic artwork depicting ‘Yhorm the Giant’ from ‘Dark Souls 3’ towering over the protagonist from ‘Dark Souls 3’, ‘Ashen One’. The giant figure holds a massive sword that is planted in the ground with both hands, while the comparitively tiny ‘Ashen One’ holds a regular sized sword in his right hand and adopts a fighting stance. Text placed over the stomach of the giant character, and over the smaller protagonist figure, reads as follows]
BOTS
LEMMY
^I’m a human volunteer transcribing posts in a format compatible with screen readers, for blind and visually impaired users!^
Look up the origins of IRC’s EFNet, which was created specifically to exclude a server that allowed too-easy federation and thus became an abuse magnet.
Wow it’s been so long since I’ve thought about IRC. Does anyone you know still use it regularly?
Yes, people still use it all the time. More people use IRC day to day than they do Lemmy at the moment. Though Lemmy’s numbers are close without the bots. Lemmy will overtake IRC soon if it’s not already. I’ve got a v3 IRC client right here on my desktop.
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I believe you can literally just add a . To the end of your own gmail and it will go to yours. Ie hello.1@gmail.com will go to hello@gmail.com.
Actually, hello.1@gmail will go to hello1@gmail.
The one you are thinking I believe is hello+1@gmail will go to hello@gmail
BTW, it might be more inclusive language to use “allow list” and “block list”
I can’t imagine being so obsessed with race politics as to think that purely technical terms like “white list” and “black list”, which have never had any connection to race relations whatsoever, are somehow non-inclusive.
With all due respect, it’s from NIST’s guidance
The admin https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/db0 from the lemmy.dbzer0.com instance possibly made a solution that uses a chain of trust system between instances to whitelist each other and build larger whitelists to contain the spam/bot problem. Instead of constantly blacklisting. For admins and mods maybe take a look at their blog post explaining it in more detail. https://dbzer0.com/blog/overseer-a-fediverse-chain-of-trust/
db0 probably knows what they’re talking about, but the idea that there would be an “Overseer Control Plane” managed by one single person sounds like a recipe for disaster
I hear you. For what it’s worth it is mentioned in the end of the blog post, the project is open source, people can run their own overseer API and create less strict or more strict whitelists, instances can also be registered to multiple chains. Don’t mistake my enthousiasm for self run open social media platforms for trying to promote a single tool as the the be-all and end-all solution. Under the swiss cheese security model/idea, this could be another tool in the toolbox to curb the annoyance to a point where spam or bots become less effective. Edit: *The be-all and end-all *not be and end all solution
Obviously biased, but I’m really concerned this will lead to it becoming infeasible to self-host with working federation and result in further centralization of the network.
Mastodon has a ton more users and I’m not aware of that having to resort to IRC-style federation whitelists.
I’m wondering if this is just another instance of kbin/lemmy moderation tools being insufficient for the task and if that needs to be fixed before considering breaking federation for small/individual instances.
He explained it already. It looks for a ratio of number of users to posts. If your “small” instance has 5000 users and 2 posts, it would probably assume a lot of those users would be spam bots. If your instance has 2 users and 3 posts, it would assume your users are real. There’s a ratio, and the admin of each server that utilizes it can control the level at which it assumes a server is overrun by spam accounts.
Everyone is talking about how these things won’t work. And they’re right, they won’t work 100% of the time.
However, they work 80-90% of the time and help keep the numbers under control. Most importantly, they’re available now. This keeps Lemmy from being a known easy target. It gives us some time to come up with a better solution.
This will take some time to sort out. Take care of the low hanging fruit first.
Plus, if this becomes the “bot wild west” at such an early stage, the credibility hit will be a serious hindrance to future growth…
Mine got blown up a day or two ago before I had enabled Captch. About 100 accounts were created before I started getting rate-limited (or similar) by Google.
Better admin tools are definitely needed to handle the scale. We need a pane of glass to see signups and other user details. Hopefully it’s in the works.
First of all: I’m posting this from my .ml alt. Because i can not do it from my .world main. That i can’t do it, i found out just because i was waiting for a response on a comment where is was sure that the OP would respond. After searching, i found out that my comment and my DM’s never where federated to .ml.
So, that said: I’m all for defederating bad instances, i’m all for separation where it makes sense. BUT:
- If an instance is listed on join-lemmy, this should work as the normal user would expect
- We are not ready for this yet. We are missing features (more details below)
- Even instances that officialy require applications, can be spam instances (admins can do what ever they want), so we would need protection against this anyways. Hell, one could just implement spam bots that talk directly federation protocol, and wouldn’t even need lemmy for this …
Minimal features we need:
- Show users that the community they try to interact with is on a server that defederated the users instance
- Forbid sending DM’s to servers that are not fully federated
Currently, all we do is: Make lemmy look broken
And before someone starts with: “Then help!”, i do. I do in my field of expertice. I’m a PostgreSQL Professional. So i have build a setup to messure the lemmy SQL performance, usage patterns, and will contribute everything i can to make lemmy better.
(I tried rust, but i’m to much C++ guy to bring something usefull to the table beyond database stuff, sry :( )
Please stop trying to tell me how to run my instance. If I wanted your input or your rules I would have joined your instance.
If you have a problem with my instance you’re in your right to defederate or block me. But I do not care about your plea to enable shit that I don’t want to enable.
What I will say is that congrats! You’ve shown that you’re willing to bot manipulate your post. That earns a ban from my instance! That’s the glory of the Fediverse.
I get you probably don’t care at all about people who interact with your community but letting bots run free is something I really dislike. I suspect the majority of users feel the same.
Just takes one disgruntled person who is unhappy with you to flood your server without any captcha or other measures taken to prevent it. Might be still under the radar to a degree as of right now but that will not always be the case.
The only way to get rid of the bots is for moderators to pay attention.
I’m against email domain whitelists and captchas (at the very least Google’s captchas).
Why against captchas? Why Google’s in particular?
It largely just trains their AI, and a lot of people don’t want to do that.
Also, a lot of captcha implementations have issues with content blockers and whatnot.
@archchan@lemmy.ml have a literary “arch” in their name. Do you really have to ask why a fan of arch linux is against anything that google has even touched?
I’ve never heard of arch linux.
We need a distributed decentralized curated whitelist that new servers will apply to be on it and hopefully get a quick week max response after some kind of precisely defined anti spam/bot audit. Also then periodic checks of existing servers.
Like crypto has transaction ledger confirmed some kind of notabot confirmation ledger chain.
Weak side if bot servers get on whitelist somehow in enough numbers they can poison it
Mind you this whitelist chain has nothing to do with content itself just whether it is AI/spam/bots or human
Agreed, this is actually the use case for a blockchain. Intances should produce documents attesting to the quality of other instances. This would allow each instance to construct white or black lists off thes data and propogate info on bad actors or new quality servers. It would be decintalized, consistent and signed.
There is a number of blockchain attempts to do this already. Because they are servers, it should work well here.
Auto-block federation from servers that don’t respect.
NO! Do NOT defederate due to how an instance chooses to operate internally. It is not your concern. You should only defederate if this instance causes you repeated trouble offenses. Do not issue pre-emprive blanket blocks.
If they choose not to take measures against bots defederation is the only way to keep that wave out of your own instance.
Do not make assumptions on how other instances are operating. You don’t know what measures they’re taking. If they did not cause you trouble yet, don’t try to predict it by making generalizations. It creates an echo chamber Internet.
Agree! Defederation is a nuclear option. The more we do it, the more we reduce the value of “the fediverse”, and the more likely we are to kill this whole project.
I think defederation should only be a consideration if an instance is consistently, frequently becoming a problem for your instance over a large period of time. It’s not a pre-emptive action.
