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[Discussion] Protecting ourselves from bot instances

fedidb.org FediDB - Fediverse Network Statistics

Fediverse Network Statistics

If you look at the top ~20 servers on fedidb, they are very clearly botswarms. Either intentionally set up that way, or accidentally due to turning off protections and not deleting users.

You can tell this because they have 70,000 registered users, but only 10 of them are active.

I believe we should pre-emptively defederate with botswarms before they're turned on. If the instance owners clear out the bots on their instances (like lemmy.ninja did) then they should be immediately refederated.

I don't know about you guys, but I don't want this place to be drowned in spam as soon as they're activated.

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  • Question: what is the practical effect of remaining federated with an active bot swarm? Is it just that I will see bot posts in my "all" page? Or that bots will be able to post and comment in communities here and those that we are federated with?

    Sorry, I'm new to fediverse, so I'm not super familiar

    • There are 2 downsides, 1 small and 1 larger:

      Small one: the few real users there will be defederated through no fault of their own

      Larger downside: the admins of that instance will not see why they're defederated (technical limitation). They may not know why, or even know that they have a large botswarm on their instance

      I feel that these downsides are worth it though.

      • Sure, but I guess my question is what are the risks if nothing happens? In your post you say,

        I don’t want this place to be drowned in spam as soon as they’re activated.

        But what does this actually practically mean for me? Will the spam show up in my "all" page, or is the spam in the form of comments from bots on communities in sh.itjust.works, or something else? I'm not familiar enough with Lemmy, I feel, to understand the risks that a bot swarm on a different server poses to other servers

        • Anything that a user can do and the bot owner wants to do.

          Could be automated vote brigading, could be spam comments, could be spam posts in any community.

23 comments