this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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Proof that bots are manipulating content (lemmyonline.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml
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See THIS POST

Notice- the 2,000 upvotes?

https://gist.github.com/XtremeOwnageDotCom/19422927a5225228c53517652847a76b

It's mostly bot traffic.

Important Note

The OP of that post did admit, to purposely using bots for that demonstration.

I am not making this post, specifically for that post. Rather- we need to collectively organize, and find a method.

Defederation is a nuke from orbit approach, which WILL cause more harm then good, over the long run.

Having admins proactively monitor their content and communities helps- as does enabling new user approvals, captchas, email verification, etc. But, this does not solve the problem.

The REAL problem

But, the real problem- The fediverse is so open, there is NOTHING stopping dedicated bot owners and spammers from...

  1. Creating new instances for hosting bots, and then federating with other servers. (Everything can be fully automated to completely spin up a new instance, in UNDER 15 seconds)
  2. Hiring kids in africa and india to create accounts for 2 cents an hour. NEWS POST 1 POST TWO
  3. Lemmy is EXTREMELY trusting. For example, go look at the stats for my instance online.... (lemmyonline.com) I can assure you, I don't have 30k users and 1.2 million comments.
  4. There is no built-in "real-time" methods for admins via the UI to identify suspicious activity from their users, I am only able to fetch this data directly from the database. I don't think it is even exposed through the rest api.

What can happen if we don't identify a solution.

We know meta wants to infiltrate the fediverse. We know reddits wants the fediverse to fail.

If, a single user, with limited technical resources can manipulate that content, as was proven above-

What is going to happen when big-corpo wants to swing their fist around?

Edits

  1. Removed most of the images containing instances. Some of those issues have already been taken care of. As well, I don't want to distract from the ACTUAL problem.
  2. Cleaned up post.
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[–] Rottcodd@kbin.social 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The place feels different today than it did just a couple of days ago, and it positively reeks of bots.

I'm seeing far fewer original posts and far more links to karma-farmer quality pabulum, all of which pretty much instantly somehow get hundreds of upvotes.

The bots are here. And they're circlejerking.

[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Yup. And, I would bet money, it will get progressively worse, unless steps are taken to prevent it.

[–] towerful@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Theres some that aren't just money.
There are bots that mirror content from Reddit, just linking to them.
I've seen posts that are 3 or 4 crossposts (between community/instances) deep.

I want content.
I don't want bot content

[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 4 points 1 year ago

Give it a week or two, and you will start to see the emergence of tools to assist with combating these issues.

I am working on trying to build a GUI for one project to help combat spam.

There is also lemmy_helper And- its only a short matter of time before we gain access to much more powerful tools to help.

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[–] csm10495@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

Honestly to me it's the same. If anything it seems like less content but idk.

[–] tugg@lemmyverse.org 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I dont have much to add other than I am an experienced admin and was dismayed at how vulnerable Lemmy is. Having an option to have open registrations with no checks is not great. No serious platform would allow that.

I dont know of a bulletproof way to weed put the bad actors, but a voting system that Lemmy can leverage, with a minimum reputation in order to stay federated might work. This would require some changes that I'm not sure the devs can or would make. Without any protection in place, people will get frustrated and abandon Lemmy. I would.

[–] Martineski@lemmy.fmhy.ml 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

When I made a post saying that 90% (now ~95%) of accounts on lemmy are bots the amount of people saying that there's no proof and/or saying to me that there's a lot of people joining from reddit right now was astonishing.

Edit: one person said me that noone would make 1.6mln bots when there are only 150k-200k users on the platform, like WTF.

[–] flambonkscious@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 year ago

Another thing is people are likely pre-creating bot accounts and then sitting in them in case additional protections are created...

The problem is, these accounts look to us just like any new user, lurking around getting a feel for the place - there's no way to distinguish them until they start this bots acting in some fashion

[–] bren42069@thelemmy.club 2 points 1 year ago

that's a problem with democracy itself as a concept

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[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)
What, corrective courses of action shall we seek?

(Tagging large instance owners)

I sent messages to these users, notifying them to come to this thread.
  1. https://startrek.website/u/ValueSubtracted (startek.website)

They were able to get back with me- and provided this comment:

Thank you - we increased our security and attempted to purge our bots three days ago - if further suspicious activity is detected, we want to hear about it.

  1. https://oceanbreeze.earth/u/windocean (oceanbreeze.earth)
  2. https://normalcity.life/u/EuphoricPenguin22 (normalcity.life)

User returned this comment to me:

We just banned and subsequently deleted well over 2500+ of these accounts. We’ve just switched to closed registration as well.

[–] TheDude@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago

Thanks will keep an eye on this thread.

[–] AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Just wanted to point out that according to your stats, unless I don't understand them well, only 26 bots come from lemmy.world (which has open sign-ups, and uses the "easy to break" (/s) captcha) and 16 from lemmy.ml (which doesn't have open sign-ups and relies on manual approvals).

For some perspective, lemmy.world has almost 48k users right now. Speaking of "corrective action" is a bit of a stretch IMO.

[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This post isn't about lemmy.world, nor am I blaming lemmy.world!

I am trying to drag in the admins of the big instances, to come up with a collective plan to address this issue.

There isn't a single instance causing this problems. The bots are distributed amongst normal users, in normal instances.

WIth- the exception of a instance or two with nothing but bot traffic.

[–] AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'm just saying that context and scale matter. If an anti-spam solution is 99% effective, then chances are that on an instance with 100k users you are still going to have around 1k bots that have bypassed it.

[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 4 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Your right- But, the problem is-

At a fediverse-level, we don't really have ANY spam prevention currently.

Lets assume, at an instance level, all admins do their part, enable applicant approvals, enable captchas, email verification, and EVERY TOOL they have at their disposal.

There is NOTHING stopping these bots from just creating new instances, and using those.

Keep focused on the problem- the problem, is platform-wide lack of the ability to prevent bots.

I don't agree with the beehaw approach, of bulk-defederation, as such, a better solution is needed.

[–] fubo@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Some older federated services, like IRC, had to drop open federation early in their history to prevent abusive instances from cropping up constantly, and instead became multiple different federations with different policies.

That's one way this service might develop. Not necessarily, but it's gotta be on the table.

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[–] Martineski@lemmy.fmhy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (9 children)

You may also want to block lemmit.online

[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Eh- its not really a spam instance.

They are very straightforward with what their instance does- It crossposts reddit to lemmy, in that instance's communities.

In that case, its as simple as don't subscribe to it. Don't subscribe, and it won't popup on your feed.

[–] Martineski@lemmy.fmhy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, but the problem is that you don't have to subscribe yourself, once someone else from your instance interacts with communities from that instance it will flood the "new" feed on your instance making this feed useless.

[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 1 points 1 year ago (4 children)

My viewpoint-

If the users of my instance want to view reddit data redistributed to lemmy- that is their choice.

A plus side- lemmy allows you to set the defaults to only show subscribed content too.

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[–] ikiru@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 year ago

Why can't we just have nice things?

[–] Ataraxia@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lol well it was fun while it lasted! Man there are some really greedy assholes out there.

[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 3 points 1 year ago

Well- I have not seen much evidence that supports this is actively being used... yet.

Just- bringing more attention to how easy it is to do.

[–] o_o@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Honestly, I’m interested to see how the federation handles this problem. Thank you for all the attention you’re bringing to it.

My fear is that we might overcorrect by becoming too defederation-happy, which is a fear it seems that you share. However I disagree with your assertion that the federation model is more risky than conventional Reddit-like models. Instance owners have just as many tools (more, in fact) as Reddit does to combat bots on their instance. Plus we have the nuke-from-orbit defederation option.

Since it seems like most of these bots are coming from established instances (rather than spoofing their own), I agree with you that the right approach seems to be for instance mods to maintain stricter signups (captcha, email verification, application, or other original methods). My hope is that federation will naturally lead to a “survival of the fittest” where more bot-ridden instances will copy the methods of the less bot-ridden instances.

I think an instance should only consider defederation if it’s already being plagued by bot interference from a particular instance. I don’t think defederation should be a pre-emptive action.

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Honestly, I’m interested to see how the federation handles this problem.

Ditto. Perhaps we're going to see a new solution for an old problem.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I noticellot of instances which were flooded with bots due to the open registration. I have most of them *defederated for this reason.

[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

We need a better solution for this, rather then mass-bulk defederation.

In my opinion- that is going to greatly slowdown the spread and influence of this platform. Also IMO- I think these bots are purposely TRYING to get instances to defederate from each other.

Meta is pushing its "fediverse" thing. Reddit, is trying to squash the fediverse. Honestly, it makes perfect sense that we have bots trying to upvote the idea of getting instances to defederate each other.

Once- everything is defederated- lots of communities will start to fall apart.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I agree. This is why I started the Fediseer which makes it easy for any instance to be marked as safe through human review. If people cooperate on this, we can add all good instances, no matter how small, while spammers won't be able to easily spin up new instances and just spam.

[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What- is the method for myself and others to contribute to it, and leverage it?

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago (7 children)

First we need to populate it. Once we have a few good people who are guaranteeing for new instances regularly, we can extend it to most known good servers and create a "request for guarantee" pipeline. The instance admins can then leverage it by either using it as a straight whitelist, or more lightly by monitoring traffic coming from non-guaranteed instances more closely.

The fediseer just provides a list of guaranteed servers. It's open ended after that so I'm sure we can find a proper use for this that doesn't disrupt federation too much.

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[–] towerful@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is this finally an application for a Blockchain?
Some sort of decentralised registry of instance reputation?

[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well- we have a centralized registry of instance reputation being worked on and developed right now.

[–] towerful@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Which is awesome.
I actually have no idea where Blockchain tech could exist.
A reputation could be an excellent example. But if it can be manipulated or gamed, it kinda makes it pointless.
At which point a centralised registry makes sense.
As long as the central registrar can be trusted.
But I don't think Blockchain solves that point of trust.

So, once again, turns out Blockchain tech is pretty useless.

[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The blockchain would just add the ability to verify somebody said, what it says they said.

Ie- if I say, hey, towerful is a great person. A blockchain could be leverage to ensure that that was said by me.

It does have a use- but, there is a big price to pay for using it, in terms of complexity, performance, and sized used.

In this case, I would call it unnecessary overhead, unless we determine there is foul play occuring at the point of centralization.

Edit- Although, it is still possible for users to sign messages, and still use a centralized location. That gives the best of both worlds, without the needless added complexity.

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[–] bikesarethefuture@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If Twitter can't avoid bots how will the fediverse avoid it, using some captcha maybe?

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[–] bren42069@thelemmy.club 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

the problem is that activity pub is dumb and bad

[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 6 points 1 year ago

This, isn't a problem specific to activity pub, lemmy, or any individual platform in general.

Reddit faces this problem every day. Facebook faces this problem. Twitter faces this problem.

They all do.

And, each platform has to determine the best method for that platform to deal with this issue.

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