Maybe you guys already know about the bot signup over lemmy.world. Now they are all over the lemmyverse. The top 20 fastest growing instances in the threadiverse are probably suffering from it. The top one, lemmy.podycust.co.uk, has 10k users with 7 total posts. The total user count of threadiverse is now 544k, compared to 270k on June 19. We may be facing 200k+ bots at this point. Also these instances are in the federation. If any admin of these instance abandons ship, this creates huge liabilities to the threadiverse.

Lemmyverse needs to figure out how to deal with this. But before that happens, do you guys think Beehaw should preemptively defederate these affected instances? Or could there be a better solution?

  • Parsley@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Newbie question: what is the motivation of the parties creating these bots? What do they gain out of this? Are they seeking to destabilize lemmy?

    • cura@beehaw.orgOP
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      1 year ago

      What spammers want, how they do it, and how to prevent it

      What do spammers want? The main motivation for spam is profit. Spam tends to be very lucrative, even when spammers are just peddling questionable products. That said, there are worse ways that spammers use for financial gain. One such way is phishing, that is, to get sensitive personal information, such as passwords or credit card information, from the user, by pretending to be an important or official source, such as a bank or an IT manager, or promoting a fake offer to grab the user’s attention. With the popularity of social media, there are even phishing techniques focused entirely on creating authentic-looking posts for this exact purpose. Another possible motive for spam is to turn your computer into a zombie. In computer science, a zombie is a computer that has been infected by a virus or a hacker and is now controlled remotely by the attacker, without the user being aware. These infected computers are then used for malicious intent, such as by being used to orchestrate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks or even to spread more spam online via e-mail spam, ultimately getting more profit in the process. There are also spammers that seek to add links back to their own websites or to misleading offers, in a misguided attempt for higher search engine ranks to those websites. These attempts at linkbuilding are non-recommended SEO tactics that are frowned upon by Google, as they are attempts at tricking both search engines and users by dishonest linkbuilding. Whatever the case may be, spam ultimately boils down to malicious intent, either towards you, your site or your users.