this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Meta (lemm.ee)
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Yesss and around 800K are spam accounts.. :(
Also a way to harvest personal data and passwords, and drive traffic to instances.
New users tend to register with the busiest servers. So, start your own instance, flood it with fake users to get to the top of the rankings. Tweak Lemmy to store passwords instead of hashes. Allow open registration, sit back and wait for people to sign up with their emails and potentially-reused passwords.
Ranking instances by number of users drives undesirable behaviours all-round.
I guess this is a potential disadvantage to decentralization. With a centralized site, the owner would have a vested interest in the security of the site because culpability for stolen passwords or other nefarious things would fall back to them. Here, with a decentralized model, instance owners can manipulate the particular instance to not match others and do nefarious things. Up to now I had only heard of the benefits of decentralization and hadn't thought of this. Food for thought perhaps. All it takes is a few or even one nefarious instance (if its bad enough) to spoil the general public's thought on this model.