Since early December, someone has created 65+ accounts with variations of the same name, and they have used those accounts for vote manipulation.

We reached out to the admin of the instance 4 weeks ago, recommending that they enable registration applications, upgrade the captcha difficulty, and/or require an email address to prevent this. We have not received a reply.

When we checked the logs this week, we saw that a new chain of accounts was created. This is creating extra work for our admin team to find and ban these accounts.

Defederation will block the instance, their communities, and their users from everyone on lemmy.ca and piefed.ca. Similarly, it will block content from lemmy.ca and piefed.ca from going to their instance.

Currently, less than 10 users from lemmy.ca are subscribed to a community there, the majority of which are subscribed to 1 community max.

You can view their communities here: https://lemmy.org/communities

Please share your feedback about this action in this thread.

all 49 comments

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[–] [M] 21 points 8 months ago

This is now done.

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  • [–] 76 points 8 months ago

    Sounds reasonable, thank you for informing us. I support the proposed move.

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  • [–] 46 points 8 months ago

    I very much appreciate you communicating about this.

    I agree that defederating seems like the right solution.

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  • [–] 44 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    No objections. It looks like a small instance. Can refederate if improved.

    The admin seems related to some AI ad tech firm. Also I'm curious how they got lemmy.org. It was registered in 2020. I imagine it was registered speculatively.

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  • [–] 28 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    The admin seems related to some AI ad tech firm

    I found a mastodon account with the same tagline. Everything including the avatar, uploaded media and toots seem to be AI generated.

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  • [–] 40 points 8 months ago
    [–] 31 points 8 months ago

    Four weeks with no reply? Fire away, I say.

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  • [–] 24 points 8 months ago

    Don't delay, defed today.

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  • [–] 22 points 8 months ago

    Go for it. They're not bringing anything positive to our experience.

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  • [–] 19 points 8 months ago

    Absolutely, seems like they're making the fediverse worse.

    Thanks for your work and letting us know/vote!

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  • [–] 17 points 8 months ago

    Sounds like a great reason, and i doubt any of the 10 users will notice.

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  • [–] 14 points 8 months ago

    Yes please! Part of the reason to move to this platform is the content and more importantly spam and bot manipulation.

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  • [–] 14 points 8 months ago

    Doesn't look like the negative impact would be very significant - thumbs up from me.

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  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago

    Seems like a good enough reason to defederate.

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  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago

    Why not? A quick glance shows it’s basically one guy spamming links to…himself?

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  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago

    This is the beauty of federated services. If someone is making more work for you, you have every right to defed.

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  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago

    If they are acting against the interests of the community de federate.

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago

    This is why we can defederate. I’m for it

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago
    [–] 7 points 8 months ago
    [–] 7 points 8 months ago

    Go for it. if you're running a lemmy instance and cant manage simple comms between other instance admins you really can't complain if they defederate from you. It doesn't seem very busy either with most of the posts being mirrors of other instances.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago

    This is the way, defed until they update their settings.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago
    [–] 6 points 8 months ago

    Sounds good to me! The fewer bots, the better.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Imagine a gif of ben Stiller saying "do it ".

    P.s. how can I add gif responses?

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    The unfortunate thing is that this has a negative effect on the Lemmy brand, even if not affiliated.

    This gets into copyright enforcement territory, though, which I don't know if Lemmy is interested in doing.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago

    Yes, i agree too. Defederate!

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago

    Okay, thank you for doing this!

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    It looks like ttrpg.network is also being used. Will that instance be blocked as well?

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    If we do, we will reach out to them first with any concerns and then make another post here prior to blocking them.

    Based on the time stamps, it does look like the same person made 17 accounts on ttrpg.network on December 8th before going back to making them on lemmy.org. Running a more robust query, in total I'm seeing 88 of those accounts on lemmy.org and the 17 accounts on ttrpg.network, all of which are banned on here.

    Right now I'm thinking that we will keep an eye out for more accounts, and then reach out to admins if it becomes a problem on another instance

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  • [+] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)
  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    The customer is always right, used to be a thing.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    I support the proposal to defederate.

    Thank you admins for your efforts, and also for soliciting this feedback before taking the proposed action!

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  • [–] -1 points 8 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] [S] 3 points 8 months ago

    I haven't looked into CM002, but this is a different situation.

    For this one, all of the accounts were made on that instance and follow a format of phrase01, phrase02, etc

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  • [–] -1 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    I am on more than one lemmy.world group. To say that your community won't feel an impact is disingenuous.

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