2y ago

Defederation from instances suspected of becoming bots haven

We've defederated from :

``lemmy.k6qw.com,lemmy.podycust.co.uk,waveform.social,bbs.darkwitch.net,cubing.social,lemmy.roombob.cat,lemmy.jtmn.dev,lemmy.juggler.jp,bolha.social,sffa.community,dot.surf,granitestate.social,veenk.help,lemmyunchained.net,wumbo.buzz,lemmy.sbs,lemmy.shwizard.chat,clatter.eu,mtgzone.com,oceanbreeze.earth,mindshare.space,lemmy.tedomum.net,voltage.vn,lemmy.fyi,demotheque.com,thediscussion.site,latte.isnot.coffee,news.deghg.org,lemmy.primboard.de,baomi.tv,marginalcuriosity.net,lemmy.cloudsecurityofficehours.com,lemmy.game-files.net,lemmy.fedi.bub.org,lemmy.blue,lemmy.easfrq.live,narod.city,lemmy.ninja,lemmy.reckless.dev,nlemmy.nl,lemmy.mb-server.com,rammy.site,fedit.io,diggit.xyz,slatepacks.com,theotter.social,lemmy.nexus,kleptonix.com,rabbitea.rs,zapad.nstr.no,feddi.no```

based on the list of instances made by @sunaurus@lemm.ee here - Thank you again for that work, it's highly appreciated.

This is a preventive measure against massive amounts of accounts being created for botting purposes. Most instances banned appear to be 1 user instances so we don't think this will have a great effect on anyone's usage of Beehaw. If you are an admin of one of those instances, feel free to contact us at support@beehaw.org

61 comments

here is a list, btw, of tools we'd like if possible:
Role for approval of applications (to delegate)
Site mods (to delegate from admins)
Auto-report posts with certain keywords or domains (for easier time curating without reports)
Statistics on growth (user, comments, posts, reports)
User total
MUA
User retention
Number of comments
Number of posts
Number of reports open
Number of reports resolved

Sort reports
by resolved/open
by local/remote

Different ways to resolved a report
Suspend account for a limited amount of time rather than just banning
Send warning

Account mod info
Number of 'strikes' (global and local) and reports
Moderation notes
Change email
Change password
Change role

Ability to pin messages in a post
Admins should be able to purge
Filter modlog to local
Better federation tools (applications to communities, limiting)
Applications to communities to allow safe spaces to exist (people should not be able to just "walk in" on a safe space - similarly to follow requests in Mastodon in a way)
Limiting (Lock our communities down from certain instances but still allow people using our instance to talk to people from those instances)

federation tools are our highest priority, but any of these would be welcome additions

This is one of the many, but perhaps most pressing of reasons we need better moderation and admin tools. There is currently no way to stop spam from instances like this except defederation at this time.
Realistically there are far too many small instances which are set up by a single person who's setting up an instance for their own learning, their own fun, or other reasons but who isn't a fullstack developer, a seasoned sysadmin, good at sysops, a database engineer, a security expert, and all the roles an instance currently needs with how new this platform currently is. There will always be more instances like this as an attack vector for spam, trolling, and other malicious purposes.
If the goal is to allow people to set up their own instances and we are promoting and encouraging people to do this, we need tools for the larger instances to manage this or we're going to end up with a community that is constantly in the process of fragmenting more and more and one where measures are taken by the largest instances to isolate themselves from smaller instances which are frequently used as attack vectors.
If you're a developer, please please please focus your efforts on more granular administrative tools. We cannot whitelist or blacklist instances. There are no tools to evaluate how trustworthy a source is. There are plenty of individuals with great ideas on how this might be accomplished, and having access to many different tools and strategies will make this platform healthy.

Some risk will be necessary. At some level we do have to let small instances with minuscule communities exist and participate in the wider fediverse, otherwise this whole thing will just fiat centralize.
The cautionary tale is email. In a way, Email is the most successful decentralized protocol. Anyone can technically throw up a client and start communicating with any other email server. The problem of course, is that if you do this in practice, your email will almost never get through to the majority of people. Why? Most of the large providers of email have formed what amounts to a whitelist of trust, and either outright reject participants they don't recognize, or subject those outside participants to incredibly high standards that they themselves to not have to abide by.
So, email has practically become a centralized affair controlled by a few big stakeholders. A lot of small email providers have gotten out of the game in the last decade because they're tired of dealing with it. It's a mess.
I'm not against greater tools, but I'd inject that health is not solely measured by the lack of spam. A spam-free fediverse that's just one instance and its three closest friends is not healthy. Whatever solutions are developed should leave open the door for small instances to still participate and have a honest chance at survival.
- Thank you for eloquently putting something that I have been struggling to put into words. I really hope that the big instances don't all end up moving to a whitelist federation model, the ability to have my own instance, with the ability to interact with any community in the fediverse, is what brought me here.
  That said, a lot work needs to go into making this platform more resilient against spam bots. The biggest problem I see is that the default instance settings aren't resistant at all. It seems to me that it shouldn't even be possible to deploy a lemmy instance with no email verification, no captcha, and open sign-ups, but here we are.
  Perhaps some sort of sanity check in lemmy that disables federation in that case might be a good idea. If someone is competent enough to implement their own spam protection beyond those, they're probably competent enough to fork lemmy and disable said sanity check
- The email comparison is pretty apt. I think one of the things they eventually had to deal with was reputation of different entities. Right now it's essentially a boolean situation for the various server admins to identify things that could cause trouble and take preventative steps of blocking or not blocking them.
  We would need to answer so e questions around how to quantify what good behavior looks like in lemmy that aren't trivial to game/bypass.

This is an enormous undertaking (all the moderating) and we all appreciate it.
What's the best way for beehaw users to support you and the other mods?
- If you're capable, probably working on Lemmy's codebase to improve the mod and federation tools.
  If not, donations would be appreciated
  
  I know nothing about coding, so I went the donation route. It’s like when friends of mine had potluck dinners, but I couldn’t cook, so I just brought the beer lol
  
  What sort of tools are lacking? Like, if there was a change you could make what would it be?

Maybe we should not federate by default but rather have admins send us an email to request federation, just like users have to send an email with a request to register?
Or not federate by default if the registration is open without requiring an email?
- This would add friction since it would give lots of work for new instances. They'd need to manually ask federation with every other instance. Besides how would admins vet other instances?
  An idea would be to allow any new instance to federate in one-direction mode (eg other instances' user can see public beehaw post). Then after a waiting period automatically move them to read-only bidirectional mode (users see other the other instance's posts, but can't post), then after another period move them to full read-write federation mode.
  It would give time for admins to vet the instance during an observation/waiting period, and the level of trust would incrementally increase over time if no block/action is taken by admins.

hey, my fedit.io instance is clear now. I deleted the entire db.

Thank y'all for being so proactive. I've been dismayed at the spike in Lemmy users over the past few days. The number of instances popping up with many thousands of accounts is suspicious.
Thank you again for working so hard to keep this space "clean".

Begun, the bot wars have.

Do you believe this will be a workable model going forward, or are you considering changing to an Allowlist for federation and have instances specifically request to federate?
- we don't think we need to switch to an allowlist--we actually haven't been hit by this spam problem much if at all to this point--but we'd also really like it if we had better mod tools so we can just flat rule out needing to switch to one ever
- An allowlist would be nice if non-Allowlisted instances could still be discoverable by people using Beehaw IMO.
  
  And then users from inside Beehaw could request federation maybe?

Appreciate it guys! I've been reading about the guys wave of bots signing up, nice to hear you're taking steps against it.

Side note, life has been so much better in my feed since defederating from the instances that were becoming furry/gonewild heavy. Thank you for your diligence.

Thank you
A question: Is it possible on Lemmy intances to put the reason for defederation beside the server domain on the defederated intances list?
- nope but that's a great idea for developers 😄
  
  I've actually got some PRs out right now to add this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3168 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/1367 They both need a bit of back & forth to get into a mergeable state though, so will probably be a little while!
- Currently it isn't and I don't think, that this would be the best idea ever since it could be misused as some kind of index to find bad instances. The defederated-list is available to the public and thus the defederating instance could in fact be "advertizing" the instances they defederated from ("Look, we don't want this stuff here, but these instances are for [right-wing|transphobes|bots|spammers|porn]")...
  Depending on where the instance is hosted or where the admin lives, it might even be illegal to in fact point people to places where they can find certain things.
  
  In my experience, it helps people new to the fediverse (specially if they want to start their own server) to know who to block/limit. People who actually want to be in those kind of massively defederated instance know how to join them and even have their own list of instances to join, without looking at the list from a small queer instance or even sites like JoinFediverse and the like.

I’d almost begin to think about the possibility of maybe respecting someone’s honesty if they named their instance something straightforward like lemmy.bothaven.fu

Glad to hear it, beehaw owns.

I really expected better from k6qw.com.

Glad to see we defederated from the rabbitears instance.
Thank you, sunaurus and Beehaw!

Good call... as our wonderful userbase across Lemmy gets bigger, so do our threats, unfortunately. Hopefully we can better combat spam and botting soon because it's hurting big and small Lemmy servers.

I added these to my list as well. I am still seriously back and forth on whether to open my instance up in a week or so.
You all are one of the larger instances. Is there anyt outreach or communications that can be made to ensure I dont end up on said list?
- You can always send us an email if that ever happens.
  That said - if you open, enable captcha and honestly, I'd recommend you do an application process and think about the community you wanna build.
  
  That said - if you open, enable captcha and honestly, I’d recommend you do an application process and think about the community you wanna build.
  Yeah that's a definite thing on mine now as is, if for no other reason than to maintain clean relations with my hosting provider. TBH my instance will be user/federated only. Dont really have the time or willpower to moderate communities. Just want a place for folks to sign up and be able to access other communities like yours.
  But that will also require some coordination in some cases. Dont really have any care to host trolls or folks that argue in bad faith though either. Will easily just ban em.

This is what I would hope for. Botnests are going to pop up inevitably and measures need to be taken.
- Individual instances can do everything in their power to keep their corner of things bot free, but the nature of federation means bots will just create their own instances and strike from there. It's going to be a long game of wackamole but hopefully they can keep the swarm at bay
  
  This is one of the many, but perhaps most pressing of reasons we need better moderation and admin tools. There is currently no way to stop spam from instances like this except defederation at this time.
  Realistically there are far too many small instances which are set up by a single person who's setting up an instance for their own learning, their own fun, or other reasons but who isn't a fullstack developer, a seasoned sysadmin, good at sysops, a database engineer, a security expert, and all the roles an instance currently needs with how new this platform currently is. There will always be more instances like this as an attack vector for spam, trolling, and other malicious purposes.
  If the goal is to allow people to set up their own instances and we are promoting and encouraging people to do this, we need tools for the larger instances to manage this or we're going to end up with a community that is constantly in the process of fragmenting more and more and one where measures are taken by the largest instances to isolate themselves from smaller instances which are frequently used as attack vectors.
  If you're a developer, please please please focus your efforts on more granular administrative tools. We cannot whitelist or blacklist instances. There are no tools to evaluate how trustworthy a source is. If there's a blacklist/whitelist, there's no way for an instance or a user to apply to a community on another instance. There are plenty of individuals with great ideas on how this might be accomplished, and having access to many different tools and strategies will make this platform healthy.

I have an account with Rammy that I had created specifically because I wanted to be able to interact with both Beehaw and Lemmy.World. It is so hard to find an instance that lets me interact with both, because Beehaw keeps defederating things. Does anyone have any advice on an instance I can join which federates with both Beehaw and Lemmy.world, and isn't going to get on Beehaw's defederating list in a week?
- Rammy.site has 1.53K users even though it has 34 posts. It is currently being botted. Sorry.
  
  I guess I'm just frustrated because people have constantly told me to join a small instance and not overload the big ones. But then when you join a small instance, it gets botted exactly because it's small and the admins don't have the resources. So now I am back to square one! I don't have loyalty to any particular instance, I just want to see everything from everybody, and it feels like it shouldn't be this difficult. Sorry for venting.
- I'd suggest making several accounts. The beehaw communities are large enough that I don't need to leave beehaw to still see a lot of interesting things, and I have another lemmy account on a different instance for seeing most everything else.
  It really doesn't cost anything to have multiple Lemmy accounts, any more than it does to manage multiple email addresses. To a degree, it's even helpful for diversifying the content you see even further - beehaw is curated for quality and contribution; most instances are not.
  My beehaw account is where I have my most interesting discussions. My 'out in the wilds' account will mostly be for browsing the wealth of content that is not curated, for better or for worse.
- Here you have a list of Leemy instances, check the defederation list of both Beehaw and Lemmy World to see which is better from you.
  Have you thought on joining a Kbin server instead? They're all open to new registrations and you can see and interact with Beehaw and Lemmy World content from there as none of them are defederated.
- I'm not sure sopuli.xyz accepts new applications at the moment, but I can see and interact with most instances when logged in there, including beehaw and Lemmy.world. No affiliation, so do your own research first. They have a similar application process as beehaw so it should be relatively safe from bots and defederation. No NSFW/extremist content I've seen at least. It is quite small, though.
- I signed up with SDF Chatter, which was recommended by Awesome Lemmy Instances, which in turn was recommended by Join Lemmy. No complaints so far.

Is there a canonical list of which instances are defederated
- Yes, https://beehaw.org/instances

Thanks as always to the apparently-tireless admins.

61 comments