This is one of the many, but perhaps most pressing of reasons we need better moderation and admin tools. There is currently no way to stop spam from instances like this except defederation at this time.

Realistically there are far too many small instances which are set up by a single person who’s setting up an instance for their own learning, their own fun, or other reasons but who isn’t a fullstack developer, a seasoned sysadmin, good at sysops, a database engineer, a security expert, and all the roles an instance currently needs with how new this platform currently is. There will always be more instances like this as an attack vector for spam, trolling, and other malicious purposes.

If the goal is to allow people to set up their own instances and we are promoting and encouraging people to do this, we need tools for the larger instances to manage this or we’re going to end up with a community that is constantly in the process of fragmenting more and more and one where measures are taken by the largest instances to isolate themselves from smaller instances which are frequently used as attack vectors.

If you’re a developer, please please please focus your efforts on more granular administrative tools. We cannot whitelist or blacklist instances. There are no tools to evaluate how trustworthy a source is. There are plenty of individuals with great ideas on how this might be accomplished, and having access to many different tools and strategies will make this platform healthy.

Some risk will be necessary. At some level we do have to let small instances with minuscule communities exist and participate in the wider fediverse, otherwise this whole thing will just fiat centralize.

The cautionary tale is email. In a way, Email is the most successful decentralized protocol. Anyone can technically throw up a client and start communicating with any other email server. The problem of course, is that if you do this in practice, your email will almost never get through to the majority of people. Why? Most of the large providers of email have formed what amounts to a whitelist of trust, and either outright reject participants they don’t recognize, or subject those outside participants to incredibly high standards that they themselves to not have to abide by.

So, email has practically become a centralized affair controlled by a few big stakeholders. A lot of small email providers have gotten out of the game in the last decade because they’re tired of dealing with it. It’s a mess.

I’m not against greater tools, but I’d inject that health is not solely measured by the lack of spam. A spam-free fediverse that’s just one instance and its three closest friends is not healthy. Whatever solutions are developed should leave open the door for small instances to still participate and have a honest chance at survival.

This is an enormous undertaking (all the moderating) and we all appreciate it.

What’s the best way for beehaw users to support you and the other mods?

Maybe we should not federate by default but rather have admins send us an email to request federation, just like users have to send an email with a request to register?

Or not federate by default if the registration is open without requiring an email?

hey, my fedit.io instance is clear now. I deleted the entire db.

Thank y’all for being so proactive. I’ve been dismayed at the spike in Lemmy users over the past few days. The number of instances popping up with many thousands of accounts is suspicious.

Thank you again for working so hard to keep this space “clean”.

Begun, the bot wars have.

Appreciate it guys! I’ve been reading about the guys wave of bots signing up, nice to hear you’re taking steps against it.

Do you believe this will be a workable model going forward, or are you considering changing to an Allowlist for federation and have instances specifically request to federate?

Side note, life has been so much better in my feed since defederating from the instances that were becoming furry/gonewild heavy. Thank you for your diligence.

I’d almost begin to think about the possibility of maybe respecting someone’s honesty if they named their instance something straightforward like lemmy.bothaven.fu

Thank you

A question: Is it possible on Lemmy intances to put the reason for defederation beside the server domain on the defederated intances list?

Good call… as our wonderful userbase across Lemmy gets bigger, so do our threats, unfortunately. Hopefully we can better combat spam and botting soon because it’s hurting big and small Lemmy servers.

I really expected better from k6qw.com.