I just want to take this opportunity to say - I'm a real person! :)

It's pretty darn interesting that instead of an entire site having to deal with spam issues, you can simply cut them off the back of the train before they latch onto you! And the future of Lemmy is easily gonna be based on safe sign-in instances and bots are merely gonna push people to that. All solvable with time and proper responses like this in this changing age.

I’m sure a captcha would stop all bots. They are robots so they won’t press on the “I’m not a robot” prompt 😎😎😎 easy fix

I agree with this entirely. Defed the instances that are allowing spam to rise. They will bring all the other instances down if no action is taken. This is all part of natural selection.

I'm so glad I chose this instance, keep up the fantastic work.

Thanks for all the hard work your putting on this. Initially I thought that running an instance would pretty much have monetary cost only and not much time invested after things were set up. But looks like this is consuming your time as much as a full time job, all to make our experience better. Thanks a lot

I've heard many people lamenting defederation. Mindful defederation is an extremely important tool to prevent abuse, both by malicious actors and by corporate interests ("They're the same picture"), especially in this time of rapid fediverse expansion. It is important for instance operators to understand that "If you don't play nice, you will be forced to sit in the corner." Demonstrating the consequences of "not playing nice" will sort out not only the present issues with bot accounts, but also act as a warning to other instances and potential instances.

Rather than lamenting defederation, I believe that mindful defederation should be applied with some haste, at least for now. As you mentioned, it does not have to be permanent. It's like a nuclear bomb that you can unexplode.

Thanks for your work on this matter.

How does one figure out that there are 10,000 bots joining? I am assuming they don't self identify.

Thank you for doing this. I have been watching the user stats, and it's very clear which instances are being targeted.

Defederation should only be considered when there is a potential for serious damage to the community. Given the volume of spambots (there are a few small instances with >10,000 new "users"), defederation is the right solution in these cases. No amount of extra mods can help delete comments from tens of thousands of spambots. If it's a more manageable number of bad actors, then defederation should not be used (looking at you, beehaw).

I don't know if you want to comment publicly, but I remember seeing some discussion with the lemmy devs over implementation of captcha. Was that resolved?

Thank you for always being at the forefront of the fight against problems that affect Lemmt. I'm glad I chose this instance as my home.

Can we have a public, continuously updated list of communities we are defederated from?

Completely unrelated, but lemmys.ee would be a great instance domain name.

Thanks for the communication, sounds like a solid plan. Do you have an opinion on the removal of captcha for Lemmy v .18?

Given the tools that we have currently, this seems like the best approach. Still, defederation feels like using a nuke to handle a pest problem, which I think will be especially apparent once bots start appearing on more established instances where defederation will have more apparent consequences. It seems like you're working towards a better solution, can you share anything about what you're planning? (Without giving any tips to bad actors about evasion, obviously)

Personally, I'm wondering if there could be a way for an instance with bot filters to put users on other instances through similar filters before allowing the users to use/post in their communities. Like, for example a user from a tiny instance might have to do a captcha to get post/comment access on a lemm.ee community, while a beehah user could be auto whitelisted since the same thing isn't a problem on their instance. It would obviously take some overhauls to the community filters/join process, but I feel like it could be feasible

I was thinking the other day what purpose does defederating serve? I tend to maintain a neutral stance when it comes things. Lately have learned of a few negative reasons for defederating, was wondering what are the positive aspects? With your efforts you have showed me. Thanks for letting us know and for your efforts ☺️

Great write-up! Keep on making Lemmy better for everyone!

Will any new instances automatically be approved for federation in the entire Lemmy network? Or do you manually approve all new instances? If yes to auto-approved then I think we will have a massive problem lurking.

Why is wirebase.org defederated? It doesn't seem to be overran by bots.

I think this is a good idea.. Some instances don’t seem to take action and are growing quickly!

I’m gonna do the same on Geddit to be sure 👌🏻🥰

Spam has long been the corrosion eating away at internet services. It killed Usenet, and nearly did email.

So I've been messing around with standing up my own instance (mostly as a learning tool) and near as I can tell, even with email verification and registration required it still creates the user, they're just not enabled. How are you differentiating between servers with a large amount of unverified accounts vs servers with open signups?

Thank you for being proactive and defending the health of the community.
I really appreciate the open and clear communication.

I don’t know enough about how Lemmy works to offer suggestions, but I’ll try to bone up soon and see if I can offer suggestions.

Sounds sensible. Lemmy is going to have a rough time as reddit burns, if people come on mass the current growth rate is only going to look small by comparison. Using the tools federation gives you seems to be the right way to handle it.

Thanks for the heads up on that. Initially I thought defederation was a bad thing as in admins deciding for me what content I can and can not have access to. Now I see it's a necessary evil in preventing exploitation by spammers and bots. Thanks for staying on top of this and preserving instance quality.

It would be nice to see some kind of federation council (for lack of a better phrase) that could vet the inception of new instances. Would really take the load off admins in ferreting out the bad ones.

That's exactly how I would do it!

I know the situation really sucks, but I'm really glad I happened to join an instance with such a competent host. Not just decisions like this but also your approach to the infrastructure.

Thanks for all your ongoing efforts, and transparency with the community.