Spyke
main·Lemmy.ca's Main CommunitybyOtter

We are proposing a defederation from lemmy.org until they update their instance settings to reduce spam signups

Since early December, someone has created 65+ accounts with variations of the same name, and they have used those accounts for vote manipulation.

We reached out to the admin of the instance 4 weeks ago, recommending that they enable registration applications, upgrade the captcha difficulty, and/or require an email address to prevent this. We have not received a reply.

When we checked the logs this week, we saw that a new chain of accounts was created. This is creating extra work for our admin team to find and ban these accounts.

Defederation will block the instance, their communities, and their users from everyone on lemmy.ca and piefed.ca. Similarly, it will block content from lemmy.ca and piefed.ca from going to their instance.

Currently, less than 10 users from lemmy.ca are subscribed to a community there, the majority of which are subscribed to 1 community max.

You can view their communities here: https://lemmy.org/communities

Please share your feedback about this action in this thread.

View original on lemmy.ca

Sounds reasonable, thank you for informing us. I support the proposed move.

76

I very much appreciate you communicating about this.

I agree that defederating seems like the right solution.

46
lemmy.ca

No objections. It looks like a small instance. Can refederate if improved.

The admin seems related to some AI ad tech firm. Also I'm curious how they got lemmy.org. It was registered in 2020. I imagine it was registered speculatively.

44
squirrelreply
piefed.kobel.fyi

The admin seems related to some AI ad tech firm

I found a mastodon account with the same tagline. Everything including the avatar, uploaded media and toots seem to be AI generated.

28

Seems we won't be losing anything of value from defederating, then. That shit doesn't belong here.

19

Absolutely, seems like they're making the fediverse worse.

Thanks for your work and letting us know/vote!

19

Yes please! Part of the reason to move to this platform is the content and more importantly spam and bot manipulation.

14

Why not? A quick glance shows it’s basically one guy spamming links to…himself?

12

This is the beauty of federated services. If someone is making more work for you, you have every right to defed.

12

Go for it. if you're running a lemmy instance and cant manage simple comms between other instance admins you really can't complain if they defederate from you. It doesn't seem very busy either with most of the posts being mirrors of other instances.

7
lemmy.ca

Imagine a gif of ben Stiller saying "do it ".

P.s. how can I add gif responses?

5
Otterreply
lemmy.ca

You can find a link to a gif, and then add it with the image formatting

For example:

![description](https://example.com/do-it.gif)

Or

![](https://media1.tenor.com/m/HtRwK466tTIAAAAC/do-it-ben-stiller.gif)

Which becomes

16

The unfortunate thing is that this has a negative effect on the Lemmy brand, even if not affiliated.

This gets into copyright enforcement territory, though, which I don't know if Lemmy is interested in doing.

4
4amreply

It’s a trademark thing, not a copyright thing (those work differently) but you are correct that it will be brand-damaging.

7

I support the proposal to defederate.

Thank you admins for your efforts, and also for soliciting this feedback before taking the proposed action!

2
Ech
lemmy.ca

It looks like ttrpg.network is also being used. Will that instance be blocked as well?

2
Otterreply
lemmy.ca

If we do, we will reach out to them first with any concerns and then make another post here prior to blocking them.

Based on the time stamps, it does look like the same person made 17 accounts on ttrpg.network on December 8th before going back to making them on lemmy.org. Running a more robust query, in total I'm seeing 88 of those accounts on lemmy.org and the 17 accounts on ttrpg.network, all of which are banned on here.

Right now I'm thinking that we will keep an eye out for more accounts, and then reach out to admins if it becomes a problem on another instance

2

I haven't looked into CM002, but this is a different situation.

For this one, all of the accounts were made on that instance and follow a format of phrase01, phrase02, etc

3
lemmy.ca

I am on more than one lemmy.world group. To say that your community won't feel an impact is disingenuous.

-1
k0e3reply
lemmy.ca

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding something, but aren't lemmy.org and lemmy.world two different things?

6

You reached the end