It should come to an end soon. A post I made in the fediverse community a few days ago pointed out the arrest of the fediverse spammer group's executive Amex. It seems like their automated scripts are still running despite that though.
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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What are they even trying to achieve? It's always in Japanese with weird links
I think this video from Brodie Robertson might explain it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KCwq9e-H5M
Tl;dw there was some beef between some script kiddies (literal children) and a random Japanese dude or something like that. The script kiddies decided to do the normal internet thing and dox the Japanese dude and then created accounts using their username and spammed the fediverse so the Japanese dude (not involved in the spamming at all and the victim in this case) would get tons of hate and threats from the fediverse.
At least that's what I think this event is referring to. Please correct me if I'm wrong
All you can do is report it. There is a lot of work going on behind the scenes to keep on top of this and large amounts are getting rapidly removed before anyone even sees them.
The ease of spinning up a new instance to spam from could be an issue. It's the sort of thing a web-of-trust scoring system might help. The downside to that though could of course be bad actors just spin up 1000 instances to downrank actual legitimate instances so throwing some sort of age+weight multiplier...
Unfortunately I'm one that thinks of ideas and algorithms well, but have no concept of actual implementation in code.
I think the moderators of targeted communities should just block any Mastodon accounts from posting top-level posts. It's not as though that happens naturally that often anyway.
I don’t know what posts you’re talking about?
From the admin side we're (we being admins in general, I only admin a small instance) working on adding mod bots. From Lemmy's side I know they're working on adding more mod tools to the platform. It won't be overnight, but oddly enough these kids are helping lemmy and Mastodon by showing where the gaps are, and we'll soon have the tools to manage future attacks
One thing that should be added to lemmy officially are lemmy webhooks imo. It makes it much much faster to respond to certain stuff: https://github.com/RikudouSage/LemmyWebhook
In my mind, the fediverse has 2 major issues:
- because anyone can start up a new server, it's very easy to avoid being banned
- because anyone can just make a new community, there are multiple communities that do the same thing that are too small to sustain themselves, but would be large enough if there was just one.
The bots all seem to come from Mastodon, just keep reporting while the people on the backend work on a solution.
The first one is definitely an issue, but I struggle to think of a good solution to it that wouldn't subvert the point of federation in the first place. Not sure if it's a necessary evil, exactly, but we're really still in the early days of the tech. Time will tell if it's solvable.
The second one is more an issue with users. Ideally, while there may be "too many" communities for one topic, they would consolidate over time to a handful or even just one. And while it's worth noting that the nature of federation on Lemmy can isolate communities and instances, it's also a solvable issue on the part of users and admins, it just takes work on their part.
For the ones that include a url just block any post with that url or ban the account, it may take a bit of time to tweak it but it would cut down on it
New urls - even lists of URLs on a fleet of servers - is unfortunately not a challenge to set up.