this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

founded 4 years ago
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Please. Captcha by default. Email domain filters. Auto-block federation from servers that don't respect. By default. Urgent.

meme not so funny

And yes, to refute some comments, this publication is being upvoted by bots. A single computer was needed, not "thousands of dollars" spent.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Regarding your edit, it can't be that easy since spammers could just generate thousands of AI-written responses to questionnaires

[–] prlang 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Right, an instance owner has to endorse another on an ongoing basis though. So for example, if an instance owner named Bob initially trusts a spammer based on a questionnaire, and then that guy immediately generates 100 bot accounts to start spamming with, then Bob can revoke the trust and the spammers instances get defederated.

You also need to own a domain to run a Lemmy instance. The cheapest of which are only a few dollars a year, which isn't much but it does put at least some floor on peoples ability to generate instances that'll just get banned.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can use subdomains, which pretty much means infinite instances on a single domain.

[–] prlang 1 points 1 year ago

That's just a software / moderation issue though right? If as an instance owner you see a request from someone at "notaspammer.lemonparty.net" but six other subdomains have already been banned from "lemonparty.net" then you'd probably be pretty unlikely to approve any application.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Could it be a subdomain, though? What if a spammer started a "Lemmy instance as a service" on "legit.ml", and started creating instances on "lemmy.u.legit.ml"? What if some of the instances were actually legitimate, while thousands of others weren't? What if... oh well, the rabbit hole goes deep on this one.