cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/95652
Hey everyone, you may have noticed that some of us have been raising alarms about the amount of spam accounts being created on insufficiently protected instances.
As I wanted to get ahead of this before we’re shoulders deep in spam, I developed a small service which can be used to parse the Lemmy Fediverse Observer and retrieve instances which are suspicious enough to block.
The Overseer provides fully documented REST API which you can use to retrieve the instances in 3 different formats. One with all the info, one with just the names, and one as a csv you can copy-paste into your defederation setting. You can even adjust the level of suspicion you want to have.
Not only that, I also developed a python script which you can edit and run and it will automatically update your defederation list. You can set that baby to run on a daily schedule and it will take care that any new suspicious instances are also caught and any servers that cleared up their spam accounts will be recovered.
I plan to improve this service further. Feel free to send me ideas and PRs.
That’s a cool idea. Thanks for your work!
One question: Let’s say the script defederates an instance and then the admin of that instance cleans up their database and makes sure no new bots can register. Would your script remove them from the blacklist or would I have to manually check if all instances on my blacklist are still “infested” to give them a second chance?
Thank you for trying to get ahead of the spam influx. Trying to beat the spambots is a thankless task, but thank you anyhouw.
maybe that’s a dumb question, so sorry for that, but wouldn’t it be easier to just use a whitelist for federation instead of a blocklist?
That would lead to having to manually approve every instance by the admins. Mods can’t do that so it would 100% be on them to keep up with all the instances
I feel like the python script is maybe a bit too extreme ? 20 times more users than posts might happen on smaller instances people use mostly to browse the big ones, I feel. I ran it with a suspicion ratio of 100 and it didn’t seem to block any “legit looking communities”. But then again, it is very hard to tell.
Thanks a lot for your work !
I’m loving the innovation in the fediverse, and all the people seeing issues, bringing them up, and people at least attempting to fix.
