Lemmy.world is being "attacked" with random communities
@LMAO is flooding the site with random communities because they're salty about being banned for claiming too many community names. They claim they're trying to "fuck your entire site up" but I imagine it's a relatively quick fix to delete all the communities they're creating, LMAO.
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Looking at his profile
Yeah can't imagine why an instance admin might not want this insufferable piece of shit in their instance.
I bet it’s really spez, same energy
They need to start email verification. It will slow the trolls down.
Doesn't help too much, you can generate infinite email accounts with gmail for an example.
Manual acceptance of each and every user helps, but it's not sustainable.
Don't even need that, 1 click temporary email boxes everywhere
That's what I used.... I have no intention of being a troll or asshole, but I don't want social media like this platform linked to me IRL and never have.
Personally I just use a dumping ground email address. Just an address i use for any website I don’t particularly trust that I never look at unless I know there’s a confirmation email waiting for me
True, but a common thing websites do is block those domains, at least the easier to find ones. Nearly nobody blocks gmail.
You could block using + in a Gmail address.
Some sites do this and it's annoying. A better check is to compare the part before the + if it's Gmail.
Yeah, that's probably better.
You can add a
.anywhere in the username part of a GMail address.[email protected]is the same as[email protected]Not if you filter out . and + in gmail addresses.
In any address. Most email services support + and a few support . as well.
Sure but in gmail addresses, the dots are ignored, and anything after the + is also ignored. You can add as many dots as you want and will still go to the same address.
I use .in my email addresses with no malicious intent
It has similar function as "+"
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] etc.
Maybe admins should restrict community creation for a few days.
Idk, seems like this is quite a pivotal time with an influx of users. Be a shame to have the potential growth in community go to waste.
Counterpoint: we don't need growth if the cost is the destruction of a good thing. Guided growth is smarter and more sustainable especially when users like the subject of this post aren't unique. There are a lot of small, mean-spirited people out there who will take a dump all over everything the moment they can.
True, but they could limit community creation to, say, five a day. That would be more than the vast majority of people would legitimately need.
Unfortunately that would mean that real communities wouldn't be created since that would be used up by someone creating spam communities. Though, maybe limiting the amount of communities that could be made by one account in a certain amount of time? What about verification by email (to send a coherent reason) to the admins to create a community.
I was meaning five per day for a given user. That's why I said that would be plenty for most individuals - most people aren't legitimately going to want to create more than five communities in a day, and for them it wouldn't be a hardship to wait a day for another five. But for people like this guy, trying to flood the instance with endless/pointless communities, it would cut that down to a manageable number.
Oh 😅 I'm sorry for misunderstanding. 5 communities per day in a week is 35 communities, which I also thought was a lot. Where do we send our suggestions to the admins though?
I asked that question a while back and was told to use their git site.
Growth for the sake of growth is why reddit and everything else crashes and burns.
Eeh, federated platforms add a lot more moving parts to the mix. Since there isn't a single Lemmy that is all of Lemmy, people can always move to another instance if this one goes to shit.
There are always going to be assholes who abuse the system, always. I agree with the other poster that now is a good time to get communities up and running. People like LMAO have nothing but time to be internet douchebags and find ways around the system.
An power user in this case still can MP admins, to ask the creation of the community "manually".
Yeah but do you want new users to see this sort of carnage?
That would be giving these assholes exactly what they want.
Maybe, but what's the alternative? Other trolls seeing this vulnerability and just letting it run?
I would venture that these assholes just want maximum carnage. Requiring admin approval for a few days while a fix is pushed would mitigate that carnage.
I mean, purging them likely isn't taking that much admin time?
One click, and bam, all their communities, usernames, etc. etc. are gone.
Idk, seems like this is quite a pivotal time with an influx of users. Be a shame to have the potential growth in community go to waste.
Verifying community creation wouldn't inconvenience users, though it will place a lot of work on the admins having to sift through spam. Limiting the amount of community creations would essentially mean that it will all be used up by spam communities, though.
He got his fee-fees hurt because others didn't like that he was trying to be a selfish asshole (shocking) so now he thinks it's justice to destroy a site and affect multiple people who didn't even do anything to him. 😂 jfc
What a loser. I can't imagine being this salty about this entire situation. Suck that tiny spez pig dick I guess.
inb4 it's spez's account
it's definitely something spez would do
He's such a lil piss baby.
He's a greedy little pig boy
He’s such a cunt
This is all so offensive to piss boys, greedy pigs and cunts. Those things are all better than Spez could even imagine to be.
A little urine goblin
I'm betting it's some bigot upset that this instance defederated from one they like and/or run.
There's one in particular that was pretty big and just got defederated from most major instances.
They're mad others don't have to see their shit now
There's a pretty big "dank" community that's pretty much just racism that I've already blocked
Yeah, I feel like in addition to people choosing to leave reddit, a bunch of bigots who have been up banned from reddit are trying to come to Lemmy too.
I'd like to see something where admins have to opt in to generating rather than the current arraignment where all it takes is one user following any community for it to happen.
I had a feeling that's what the "dank" in "dank memes" meant back on Reddit when I couldn't get a straight answer from the mods there about what made a dankmeme dank and not just a meme, as it didn't have anything to do with moisture or weed. The memes themselves were mostly just reposted from regular memes; but the comments were flaming piles of shit covered tires.
drop * from communities where creator == @lmao
And, we presume, ban the originating IP. This doesn't seem like a sophisticated attack so it's probably just a single account rather than an IP hopping VPN user. Sucks that Ruud has to play whack-a-mole (whack-a-lemming?) with this idiot.
This is the way
ftfy
I can imagine that in the next few days we’ll discover everything the devs didn’t think about prior to this. Part of the fun.
Moderation on decentralized networks is way harder than otherwise, which was already a constant battle.
I'm sure the devs thought of an attack but it gets deprioritized over fixing bugs and performance. I don't think Lemmy was ready for Reddit's collapse the way mastodon was with Twitter.
Mastodon was far from ready for the first Twitter wave either. And there's also the question of whether the fediverse model can actually handle this much traffic, there's a lot of inefficient back and forth messaging between instances that's essentially baked into the protocol, something that's the opposite of what you need to do in a distributed system.
Hopefully we get the same community of moderation tools springing up that Reddit had. Bonus: they can actually be integrated into the base tooling this time!
As General Patton famously said: no social media website survives contact with its trolls.
Also the things they thought of, but haven't been a priority to address until it became a problem.
@[email protected] I'm sure you're tremendously busy already, just want to make sure you're aware of this.
https://lemmy.world/post/941618
best option is [email protected]
This is exactly the best option as it will create a ticket instantly. Thanks for pointing this out here
Thanks, sent them an email
How about just make it impossible to mod/create more than 3?
I actually like this idea. The prevention of supermods like AwkwardtheTurtle is absolutely something that should be considered.
When people previously discussed this on Lemmy, the concern would be that bad actors would create multiple accounts to get around that rule.
But again, the lock on a door doesn't guarantee your house won't get broken into, it only has to deter them with extra effort/risk that they will be less likely to do it.
I honestly can't imagine modding more than 2 communities at once. Do these people not have real lives?
Yeah it's kinda problematic. The people who need to mod everything (super mod weirdos) would just make a bunch of accounts to ge around it. However, the people who just happen to be asked to mod a fourth community would basically have to say can't do sorry mate.
Though I guess you could just have the number be high, like 10, which would probably lot be an issue for normal folks even if they mod a lot.
Easily enough fixed.
Initial mod limit of 3. Can mod an additional community 30 days after added to the mod roster for another, upto a hard cap. Maybe the delay increases exponentially.
Do you mean like having just 3 accounts to moderate a community? Because it was normal for people to create an alt account and set it as a mod too? I was thinking like setting some limits based on community activity in a period of time like, if your community gets 10 posts per week 3 people should be enough right? But if your community gets 100 posts a week maybe consider adding another 2 mods. So, limit the ammount of mods per community to 3 by default and have some sort of automated message where if you pass certain threshold like 100 posts in a week you can request the instance admins to increase the number of mods.
I mean to say the maximum amount of communities a user can moderate.
Give a low limit to start, then gradually increase the number of communities that a user can mod.
If I understand things correctly (as I and so many others here are new to lemmy), this all comes down to the discretion of the instance admin anyway. I think we’re all just contemplating “default” rules.
Ah, that makes much more sense
So let them I say. Managing 20+ accounts becomes exhausting as hell very quickly.
paid trolls are a thing...
Of course, like I said, it doesn't need to keep out everyone, just preventing the lowest effort trolls would make life a lot easier for the mods/admins.
Don't let perfection stand in the way of progress.
Who watches the watchmen
If you want to mod 200 subs but you're limited to 5-10 per account it is much much harder than being able to do it on a single account
I second this, powermods are cancer.
Thirded. Canada is having political issues because the same 5 mods are infesting almost every sub. Limits are needed.
Is that happening here too or do you mean on reddit. I know they fucked up r/canada
Bad idea.
I'm making a bunch of communities myself, but mostly to see which communities stick or don't stick. 3 is too low a number. Like ~10 or ~20 is probably reasonable.
Not that I plan to truly own 20 communities. But I probably need to create 20 communities just to find 2 good communities with enough followers.
That being said, power-modders probably need to be automatically culled. There are a bunch of people coming in, not making a single post at all and then creating 30, 40, 50+ communities. You can tell if someone is truly dedicated because they'll make at least 2 or 3 posts as a "welcome" post, or non-default sidebars (etc. etc.).
So cap communities created per month, and have a global cap on communities modded?
I dunno, honey-potting is a better idea IMO.
Let them make a billion communities. Makes it easier to catch-and-purge later. You'd rather have these accounts waste a whole bunch of their own time that can be automatically detected and dealt with.
They could probably just write a script to generate countless communities in no time. I think there should be some sort of validation.
Why does one need several "test" which communities stick at the same time? Imo, surely a month to test three-five communities is exactly the kind of usage you would be looking for whereas opening more than that just splits the user base and defeats the purpose of testing (not to mention the potential ill-effects on the instance owners as are described in this thread)
I have a lot more than just 3 interests, and many more than a few ways of making a community-name for those interests.
There are many communities of my interest that didn't exist. So in my case having only 3 would really cripple me
Why? You can subscribe to as many as you want.
Because they didn't exist, again. I had to create, for example, a Need for Speed community as it didn't exist.
Okay. I hadn't considered that.
So, it seems a few childish knobs came in with the refugees. Had to know it would happen.
I think most of the children will go back to reddit in time.
There's not going to be much of a reddit for them either, rats flee a sinking ship.
It will have bright lights and shiny ads to keep them interested.
The rotten apples are starting to appear, eh? *sigh, oh well.
They're not getting their jollies harassing people at reddit anymore. Remember, to them any attention is good attention. Employ child psychology because that's where their mind is stuck.
Yep. Same reason why they won't just hang out at places like 4chan, Truth Social, etc.
The libruls they want to "own" are here. They're leaving Reddit because Reddit's going to become a Nazi bar, seeing that half the mods left, and the other have had their tools nerfed. When the libs are gone, they get bored.
Mod of a city subreddit, here. That's basically my fear. I love that community, but it's become impossible to mod, and I have no doubt the absolutely worst people on the internet are going to be the majority of redditors eventually.
They don't deserve their jollies, but they do deserve their jolly ranchers.
I did not want to think about that today. Yet here we are.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Wise words lad.
If you're popular you have fans, if you're really popular you have haters.
I'm going to down vote to help you on your way. Ha
Truly, having some spam text in a box in the corner of the homepage "fucks the entire site up". Truly.
My disappointment is immeasurable and my site is ruined.
How don't these fuckwits realize this place doesn't want them? Stay over in the trash heap where you belong.
It's probably pure trolling just like the old internet. People are riled up over reddit and stoking the flames a classic recipe for pure lulz
The most annoying thing is that the "Trending Communities" section is filled with spam right now.
I think this does show an
inherentcurrent flaw with Lemmy. We need a way to report users through their profile. So far we can only report users when they comment, but this guy isn't commenting anywhere so there's no report button. Unless I'm missing something. :pThat’s not an “inherent flaw”. It’s a flaw that currently exists in Lemmy, but one that could be easily remedied with a patch that adds a “report” link to the profile. An inherent flaw would be one that is difficult or impossible to mitigate due to the concept of Lemmy.
Yup, fair enough, I'll edit it!
Also “trending communities” shouldn’t be the same thing as “new communities”.
Yep, I can't find a report button for users or communities, only comments.
There is already a proposal on github to hard limit and/or rate limit the creation of communities.
Crazy cuz they could have just made their own instance.
Some people just dont know how to lemmy
Not to mention join a smaller less populated one.
These kinds of annoyances are actually good in the long run. Idiots like this guy are helping stress test the platform and lemmy will be better for it.
Improve the servers now before things get even busier the next time reddit pisses People off.
What a loser, LMAO
A simple captcha for community creation would prevent this
I feel like the little "write why" box that some instances have for account creation would be well fit for this. But for creating communities, or atleast for big instances to keep them from having tons of ghost communities.
If you're explicitly spamming, you'd just put garbage in the 'why' box as well.
Right. Effectively you DOS the site admins this way, making it hard for actual community set up.
But if you combine it with rate limiting, email verification, and a captcha, maybe it can be slowed to a manageable crawl.
Or just a rate limit - how many communities can a person realistically start each month?
this would've been a great community for dank, deep-fried, unhinged shitpost memes
Be the change you want to see.
This is who we’re leaving behind at Reddit. Salty little baby
💀
Kick them all out. No exceptions.
Alright, mate? You want all the random communities you can get? Let me suggest you to get your own instance to flood with them.
I think we might have a few GUIs for PostgreSQL, but for the most part, you're stuck trying to figure out the best way to isolate the problem communities. Unless all of the names are absurdly long or they have some other defining characteristic in common, all new communities created within a certain timeframe might need to be deleted.
Any rdbms should be able to handle it and it should be trivial to select all communities where mod_id = troll.
That's what I meant: any variable that they all have in common should be what is selected. When we were dealing with spam accounts on NormalCity, I mostly used particular patterns in the email addresses to find problem accounts. Funnily enough, some of the accounts had flat out invalid email addresses that had no .tld, and plenty had long sequences of numbers that were easy to isolate.
This is why we can't have nice things smh. On a positive note, even the douchebags now have abandoned Reddit and think Lemmy is the future.
As someone who's new to lemmy, could someone explain who is in charge of policing and moderating community names like this? With reddit it's obv Admins but who has that level of power here?
The instance owner/admins are in charge of that. They're kind of equivalent to the Reddit admins, except if you don't like the instance admins you can go to a different Lemmy instance but you can't move to a new Reddit instance. Also, community names are unique to each instance, so ![email protected] and ![email protected] share the same name but are two separate communities in two separate instances.
No. He's creating communities (formerly subreddits) within the lemmy.world community. Ruud should still have authority over them.
Anyone can be the god of their own instance. Doesn't mean other instances need to federate and listen to whatever it spits out. I imagine some metric of quality will come for instance admins to decide who to federate with. Hopefully with a mechanism to allow small new instances to join and thrive so it doesn't devolve into only the big servers trusting each other
💀
Basically, this guy was spamming communities not instances. Basically he spammed a ton of subreddits. The guys who run the instance are above him and can just ban him and delete all of his communities.
No,
instances: servers // communities: subreddits
Instances admins have power over communities mods.
Every instance has its own admins.
Also the admins for this instance
"I think you should go home now, Devin! Get back on San Vicente. Take it to the 10, switch over to 405 North and let it dump you onto Mulholland -- where you belong!"
Walk out that door, get in your truck, and take the offramp out of my life!
wwwwwwwwwwwwwhAT'RE YOU DOING HERE STUART?!
"Look what I can do!"
Awkwardly creates a pointless, random community
... that's so fucking weird. Why would someone waste their time doing that? Why even bother reserving community names when you can just make another on a different instance with the same name? I can't believe someone would spend their weekend doing that lol.
Whenever I feel like I'm wasting my time doing something I'll think of this loser and feel better
Especially considering another instance will just make a new one in order to popularize it instead, even if it’s not .world which is shaping up to be the “main” instance
Always someone looking to exploit a system even if it’s just to watch it burn. Lemmy, if it grows, will soon get bots and everything reddit had to deal with too.
lol what a dork
Well, they were at least successful in ruining a search for the word "wefwef", the mobile app. So congrats to that troll, you got me. Bah.
It’s u/spez!!
So apparently spez isn't satisfied just fucking up Reddit, and now he is trying to fuck up lemmy, LMAO
Spez is turning into the prototype of a not-too-bright villain.
Q: "Why is there random trash dumped in the alley?"
A: "Dunno, Spez must have been here."
time for a purge
I thought it was from the wefwef users of lemmy. My eyes were fixin on the letters w e and f.
Glad it was not the case. As wefwef is a great web app
Why even delete those communities? Just let'em have their three megabytes of database space that gets never used and be done with it.
Because they will show up in the communities list and be propagated (in the list) across federated instances.
It's kind of like watching a regime change in real time. Mass movement, infrastructure scaling (mostly) JIT...
Interesting way to be salty lmaooooo
Can probably be mitigated by taking some sort of entropy threshold on the level of human language - but then the next step is Markov chain generators or chatGPT spam.
Lmao
don't think there's too much overhead adding spam-check and anti-troll software to lemmy right
your comment history is suspicious af.
Thank you for the completely unbiased opinion, Black Conservative.
Welcome
Ah yes, almost as if Beehaw made the right move. Here comes the influx of assholes from Reddit.
At this rate I might just go back to reddit because lemmy is the new place to troll. Also because my 3rd party apps still work. Honestly if people didn't come flooding in I'd be more interested in taking lemmy seriously but I also enjoy chaos... so I guess I'll watch what happens here. Gl and hf.
If you want to be Reddit you’re gonna have to deal with the Reddit shit.
What would you rather see happen with lemmy, if not wider adoption?
Courting a user base of insufferable, unfunny, terminally online idiots gets you a user base of insufferable, unfunny, terminally online idiots. If you will recall Reddit went through the same influx of shit with the digg exodus and even more so as smartphones got wider adoption.