Hopefully several instance owners collaborate on a shared blocklist that will help combat this kind of spam and implement that back into their instances.

Lemmy at least does have a slur filter in place to block certain words that could be expanded to block spam like this. I don't know if kbin has something like that or not.

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PabloDiscobar 6 points 3 years ago

We have a bigger problem and it's popularity. Some instances will want to become as big as possible, for resell value.

So they will be encouraged to let the maximum of people registering a new account, including bots and spammers. Because they make the numbers and they start the snowball effect.

Didn't you all looked a the most populated instances/magazine when you registered magz, and you didn't care about the mags with zero activity? Well, you are encouraging the process in a way.

People will be reluctant to defederate or to ban popular magazines from other subs. So the float of spammers is unlikely to stop, because the person who makes the decision, the admin of the instance, will welcome them. And you won't ban the instance or the mag.

We have to become more like a club.

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0xtero 8 points 3 years ago

Some instances will want to become as big as possible, for resell value.

What’s the resell value of an instance?

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akai 10 points 3 years ago

About tree fiddy

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effingjoe 4 points 3 years ago

I think the person you replied to is still stuck in the mindset of a siloed product, like reddit. Federation across instances means that there's little commercial value in any specific instance, in my view. If any specific instance was sold, and an attempt to monetize arose, I suspect people would simply abandon it for a new instance.

As an aside, lemmy/kbin need to implement a way to export/import follow lists.

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Teppic 2 points 3 years ago

And notably after moving instance they would still have the same access to all the same posts, comments and content.

On the export comment I agree too. Mastodon even lets you port your whole profile.

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bvanevery 1 point 3 years ago

Other people's posts / content. What about the user's own content? Sure plenty of people don't care, but there is a working set of people who do produce content online, who care about the visibility and longevity of their output.

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PabloDiscobar 3 points 3 years ago

The value of an instance is a function of the number of his registered users.

Facebook bought Instagram for the price of ~$30 per user.

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0xtero 4 points 3 years ago

Facebook bought Instagram for the price of ~$30 per user.

Yeah, sure for ad revenue.
Fediverse hasn't been monetized though, so there's no expected ad revenue. Patreons and other donations are not revenue.

You are basically just buying a bunch of hosting costs

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PabloDiscobar 1 point 3 years ago

The emails revealed that Zuckerberg wanted to buy Instagram as it was becoming a threat to Facebook.

"Facebook, by its own admission saw Instagram as a threat that could potentially siphon business away from Facebook," Nadler said during the hearing on Wednesday.

"So rather than compete with it, Facebook bought it. This is exactly the type of anti-competitive acquisition the antitrust laws were designed to prevent," Nadler added.

Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, a shocking sum at that time for a company with 13 employees,

Facebook bought the adoption, they bought the users.

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520 1 point 3 years ago

Whatever someone wants to pay for the kind of exposure this gives them.

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pjhenry1216 2 points 3 years ago

It doesn't provide them any exposure though.

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520 1 point 3 years ago

On the surface, you are correct. Think a little more insidiously and you'll start to see where the value comes in.

Let's say a person with ties to the Coca Cola corporation buys a popular instance. They are in control of that instance including where instance wide rules get enforced or not. It would be unwise to openly spout pro-Coca Cola messages and ban dissenters, so they'll be sneakier about it.

They'll create bot instances that create, upvote and boost posts and downvote dissenters, not enough to stick out, but enough to manipulate the feed algorithms early in the posts lifetime. And occasionally upvote and downvote some random posts to add noise to the user history. Otherwise, they let the instance run as it always has.

There will be accusations, but because it won't be provable or actionable outside of defederation or the banning of individual accounts. And other instances will hesitate to do the former because these accusations are not proven and the instance is still putting out content that their users are interacting with.

If the compromised instance admin needs to put out a fig leaf or two, they can ban the bot accounts and silently create more later.

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pjhenry1216 1 point 3 years ago

Your closing suggestion doesn't actually affect the process. Admins still run the joint. The admin just needs to care. Admins can even make it invite only if they wanted. Do you have any source for this marketplace of instances?

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PabloDiscobar 1 point 3 years ago

So what will you do about an instance called "rofl.lol", which is huge, which has a lot of fans locally who want to keep interacting with it and which also allows spammers? Will you keep federating or will you defederate it?

If you don't defederate this will become and endless whack-a-mole of bans with a drop of quality.

Do you have any source for this marketplace of instances?

I never talked about a marketplace of instances.

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pjhenry1216 2 points 3 years ago

I used the term colloquially. I just mean any evidence of instances being sold or even being a driving force in creating one.

I don't understand your rebuttal to the other point though. How does being a "club" not actively have the same decision to make?

Admins can defederate it if they want.

You asking this makes me wonder if I even interpret what you're saying correctly now as your question doesn't fit anymore.

What do you mean by make it more like a club if not just setting up your instance as invite-only?

Defederate it if you want. My instance doesn't appear to federate with it (it doesn't show up in the directory at least).

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brainfreeze 6 points 3 years ago

I don't know if this is quite the same thing, but @kersploosh was waging a war on bot accounts. Maybe they have some inside or can come up with something in conjunction with the admins.

Edit: that's @kersploosh @sh.itjust.works in case the one here is someone else.

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kersploosh 2 points 3 years ago

That's me! Unfortunately, I don't have any clever solutions to active spamming other than responsive moderation, and better mod tools whenever they become available.

I was notifying instance admins of suspicious user totals that looked like swarms of auto-created bot accounts. Last time I checked, half a dozen admins that I contacted have deleted about 250,000 suspicious dormant accounts. It's not a solution to the problem, but it's something.

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Illecors 5 points 3 years ago

Ban and purge.

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Cloudless 5 points 3 years ago

How? I feel like it might be too easy for such accounts to be created. And they already pollute the fediverse before their accounts get banned. I think this will be more common until we have more proactive measures.

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pjhenry1216 3 points 3 years ago

Depending on implementation, the ban may also purge past posts so the "already pollute the fediverse" won't be that big of a problem.

Can't get too proactive beyond suggesting admins implement captchas and the like. Email verification. And that won't stop all.

I don't see this being much different than what occurred on reddit.

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Norgur 2 points 3 years ago

Mutli-Accounting/Creating mass-accounts for spam-reasons has been super easy on all platforms so far. What do you reckon "more proactive measures" to be?

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Verbose2812 4 points 3 years ago

report the posts, the moderators will ban the profiles.

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stopthatgirl7 4 points 3 years ago

Do kbin and lemmy allow you to report accounts to the instance admins? I’m still used to Mastodon, where you report spam to the instance admins and they boot the accounts. That wold solve the problem at the source rather than make magazine/community mods have to play whack-a-mole.

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techno156 5 points 3 years ago

Kbin has a report function, although I don't know if reports Federate. They might not.

Lemmy does do reporting, although it's not clear whether it's just moderators, or whether the admins will also receive them.

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