Lemmy

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

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Bots are trying to join my instance now through the application requirement (lemmyverse.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I have the application process enabled for people to join my instance, and I've gotten about 20 bots trying to join today when I had nobody trying to join for 5 days. I can tell because they are generic messages and I put a question in asking what 2+3 is and none of them have answered it at all, they just have a generic message.

Be careful out there, for all you small instance admins.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (18 children)

Why are these bot operators going through the hassle of joining existing instances... couldn't they just set up their own, since instances would need to manually defederate them after they spam?

I wonder how difficult it would be to take a Formspree-style approach to combat the bots, using a hidden form field

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Detecting and blocking whole instances with many bots is somewhat trivial. Blocking and detecting some number of bots in an instance with 10k users, with an ever growing number of human users, is much harder.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Setting up an instance would be more difficult too I assume

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

It's honestly not too bad, only took about an hour after researching a couple of days. There's an easy deploy script out there, that I don't have a link for on my phone, that makes it really easy.

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