They can literally setup an instance themselves. By the time it is identified as such, the damage is basically done. Just make a new one. Or use one of the many instances not requiring approval. Or fill out the form with ai. They don’t actually need an insane number of accounts for their subterfuge. Having just “some” and keeping them tied to conversational themes/topics seems sufficient?
I’d argue it is resistant. Lemmy is federated, which means smaller instances, making it easier to detect this kind of activity. Crime in a city vs crime in a town situation
Nah, it works for now because no one really tries to spam lemmy. If it gets popular enough companies will pay bot farms to post here and admins want be able to keep up with moderation. Bots will simply join the biggest instances. The only solution would be to defederate the main instances and have everyone pretty much host their own server.
I think to an extent yes, but not quite as bad as Reddit. Reddit admins will completely ignore reports about these. I think most Fediverse admins won’t ignore them.
look at Mastodon and it’s practically what’s happening there. bot farms don’t even bother setting up their own servers, they just go to mastodon.social (by far the largest instance) and bot from there. and because .social refuses to have manual approval for each account, and many instances don’t want to defenerate from where almost everyone is, the problem keeps happening…
And if everybody hosts their own server, than so will the advertisers and everybody will have to defederate then individually making the problem of moderation even worse.
When it gets bad enough the default will switch from blacklists to whitelists and the user base will consolidate to fewer and fewer popular instances that are able to address the spam.
Bots will simply join the biggest instances. The only solution would be to defederate the main instances and have everyone pretty much host their own server.
the user base will consolidate to fewer and fewer popular instances that are able to address the spam.
But hosting servers cost real money so creating thousands of them may not be cost effective for spammers. Paywalls are the best defense against spammers. Of course this is all hypothetical. Self hosting will never be mainstream. Or maybe? 🤔
What if we make self hosting super easy? Like select the services you want to host, choose a domain, pay and bam, you’ve got your self hosted instance of lemmy/mastodon/pixelfed and so on?
There is at least one company that does provide managed Lemmy services (which makes sense, since a lot of people might want to run their own instance, but don’t want to deal with security and updates and setting up x.509 certs and stuff).
Hey dear community, we just launched today our fully managed hosting of Lemmy
We offer to do Deployment / Security / SSL / DNS / SMTP / Monitoring / Alerts / Backups / Automated updates / Handle migrations / Fully automated but with Human support :)
We deploy each instance on a dedicated VM, and we provide full root access as well if you want to customize anything.
Pricing start at $10/month (billed hourly, no contract)
Only $11.25/mo. Risk-free with a 14-day money-back guarantee
Those are the ones that come up in a search. They’re probably hoping that the Threadiverse will grow; enough instances could make writing scripts and whatever pretty worthwhile.
That’s just the consequence of being popular. Lemmy isn’t impervious or even resistant to this
And of insanely easy account creation. You didn’t even need an email.
Reddit doesn’t require email either.
I was talking about reddit. Lemmy, at least the instances i was on, needs manual approval
They can literally setup an instance themselves. By the time it is identified as such, the damage is basically done. Just make a new one. Or use one of the many instances not requiring approval. Or fill out the form with ai. They don’t actually need an insane number of accounts for their subterfuge. Having just “some” and keeping them tied to conversational themes/topics seems sufficient?
I’d argue it is resistant. Lemmy is federated, which means smaller instances, making it easier to detect this kind of activity. Crime in a city vs crime in a town situation
Nah, it works for now because no one really tries to spam lemmy. If it gets popular enough companies will pay bot farms to post here and admins want be able to keep up with moderation. Bots will simply join the biggest instances. The only solution would be to defederate the main instances and have everyone pretty much host their own server.
I think to an extent yes, but not quite as bad as Reddit. Reddit admins will completely ignore reports about these. I think most Fediverse admins won’t ignore them.
look at Mastodon and it’s practically what’s happening there. bot farms don’t even bother setting up their own servers, they just go to mastodon.social (by far the largest instance) and bot from there. and because .social refuses to have manual approval for each account, and many instances don’t want to defenerate from where almost everyone is, the problem keeps happening…
I didn’t know that but it’s nice to know I was 100% right.
And if everybody hosts their own server, than so will the advertisers and everybody will have to defederate then individually making the problem of moderation even worse.
When it gets bad enough the default will switch from blacklists to whitelists and the user base will consolidate to fewer and fewer popular instances that are able to address the spam.
You spin me right round, baby, right round 🎶🎶
But hosting servers cost real money so creating thousands of them may not be cost effective for spammers. Paywalls are the best defense against spammers. Of course this is all hypothetical. Self hosting will never be mainstream. Or maybe? 🤔
No way, because posting on already-established corpo platforms is much less of a barrier to entry.
What if we make self hosting super easy? Like select the services you want to host, choose a domain, pay and bam, you’ve got your self hosted instance of lemmy/mastodon/pixelfed and so on?
There is at least one company that does provide managed Lemmy services (which makes sense, since a lot of people might want to run their own instance, but don’t want to deal with security and updates and setting up x.509 certs and stuff).
kagis
Might be elest.io that I’m remembering.
https://discuss.jacen.moe/post/862
https://elest.io/open-source/lemmy
Looks like there’s another one at least:
https://www.knthost.com/lemmy
Those are the ones that come up in a search. They’re probably hoping that the Threadiverse will grow; enough instances could make writing scripts and whatever pretty worthwhile.
Think I would agree there, small reddit communities are also going to be more resistant to it. Small hobbyist stuff probably one of the better ones.
Oh, absolutely. Which is why I avoid popular social media: you just end up drowning in AI/botted content.