Overseer: A Fediverse Chain of Trust

This is my current attempt at preparing to counter the spam waves that will be appearing as the fediverse becomes more and more popular.

It involves the creation of whitelists based on a chain of trust between instances with easy ways to add and remove into it with few overheads.

Let me know what you think and if you're interested, please do register your instance at https://overctrl.dbzer0.com.

20 comments

You're right about the spam, volunteer moderators are helpless against it if they decide to spawn thousands of instances and accounts to attack. A whitelist instead of blacklist style of federation might be necessary now. I just hope it doesn't create too small of a bubble or certain large instances start to monopolize, like the way e-mail went.
- I have some plans bout that, but I need time to implement

Thank you for trying to protect the lemmy/kbin and fediverse communities. It will take lots of effort like this to keep it unshitified.

I'm not an instance admin nor am I a mod. I just started using Lemmy a couple of days ago. First, respect to you for taking the time to come up with solutions. I think your solution is at the limit of what you can do to keep bad actors from creating instances and start spamming. We need to accept it will not solve all the spam. Just like there's is still spam in the comment section on YouTube but alot less compared to a year or so ago. But, maybe having a more granular trust system of instances could be a solution to prevent smaller instances from being locked out. For example a new instance would be allowed to be whitelisted sooner than they would be allowed to endorse or guarantee other instances? Or doesn't that work in the case of Lemmy?

Good decision. Especially in the long term I see no alternatives to whitelists. Yet.

what's a fediverse?
- It's a federation of different platforms such as Lemmy, Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, and others all using a common protocol called ActivityPub to talk to each other.

Having trouble signing up over at the overctrl instance using the required username format. My domain contains a - and the username field seems to specifically reject that character.
cereal7802@lemmy.game-files.net
- please hold on. I'm reworking the registration to make this unnecessary.
- Please try now. No need to register on a third lemmy instance, just provide your domain and admin username and it should PM you the API key

20 comments