See THIS POST
Notice- the 2,000 upvotes?
https://gist.github.com/XtremeOwnageDotCom/19422927a5225228c53517652847a76b
It's mostly bot traffic.
Important Note
The OP of that post did admit, to purposely using bots for that demonstration.
I am not making this post, specifically for that post. Rather- we need to collectively organize, and find a method.
Defederation is a nuke from orbit approach, which WILL cause more harm then good, over the long run.
Having admins proactively monitor their content and communities helps- as does enabling new user approvals, captchas, email verification, etc. But, this does not solve the problem.
The REAL problem
But, the real problem- The fediverse is so open, there is NOTHING stopping dedicated bot owners and spammers from...
- Creating new instances for hosting bots, and then federating with other servers. (Everything can be fully automated to completely spin up a new instance, in UNDER 15 seconds)
- Hiring kids in africa and india to create accounts for 2 cents an hour. NEWS POST 1 POST TWO
- Lemmy is EXTREMELY trusting. For example, go look at the stats for my instance online.... (lemmyonline.com) I can assure you, I don't have 30k users and 1.2 million comments.
- There is no built-in "real-time" methods for admins via the UI to identify suspicious activity from their users, I am only able to fetch this data directly from the database. I don't think it is even exposed through the rest api.
What can happen if we don't identify a solution.
We know meta wants to infiltrate the fediverse. We know reddits wants the fediverse to fail.
If, a single user, with limited technical resources can manipulate that content, as was proven above-
What is going to happen when big-corpo wants to swing their fist around?
Edits
- Removed most of the images containing instances. Some of those issues have already been taken care of. As well, I don't want to distract from the ACTUAL problem.
- Cleaned up post.
For clarity: When you say 'this' .. which instance are you referring to?
Lemmit ofc
I don't understand. That server is mostly just reddit cross posting. What spam are you talking about? Like I'm genuinely confused what your definition of spam is here. To me its content that I enjoy.
If you don't like it: then block the bot account that posts it. I would not at all recommend defederation or anything like that with it.
Like I said, the content is not quality controled, it reposts posts made by users on reddit so op won't respond to you, there's sonmuch content pumped out at once everywhere that there's no point in engaging in those communities because noone will respond to you on topic. Another problem is that once someone interacts with some of the communities on the instance the posts will flood your "all" feed worsening it's qualiy significantly.
It's a user preference. If you don't like it.. block it yourself. Don't ruin it for other people that may like it. I'd rather have reddit content as part of my 'all' feed at least until content naturally comes over here.
I like it especially for communities that haven't (and probably won't) move from reddit. I've even requested some communities previously since content is still lacking in the fediverse. This bot is very good for my lemmy enjoyment.