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.
Maybe I’m being stupid, but how does this service actually determine suspicious-ness of instances?
If I self-host an instance, what are my chances of getting listed on here and then unilaterally blocked simply because I have a low active user count or something?
Important question; author kind of answers here:
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/204729
If I were to rely on this for my instance, I would require that it be completely transparent and open source. It doesn’t look like this is; you have to trust that it is making good selections, and give it power over your federation status. It’s a dangerous tool, IMO, but I can understand why it would have appeal right now.
Are you sure? Kinda seems like it is.
“The Lemmy Overseer” as I understand it is a backend service that gives us an API to use.
There is an open-source script for interacting with it. However, it does not tell you how that backend service works, exactly. It’s a black box with well defined interfaces, best case, as I understand it.
The python script only uses the open source Lemmy API. Everything else is contained within its few lines of code.
It’s based on dynamic count. For now it’s a very simple how many users per post there are and each instance can set their own threshold for it.
It’s not about few users, it’s about a tons of users and no activity. If you have 5000 users and 3 posts, it’s likely those are all spam accounts. This is what we’re checking for right now.
This is not a manual process currently, but I’m planning to add the possibility to whitelist and blacklist instances manually in the future.
Isn’t it trivial for bot farms to just spam posts on their home instance? And how does this handle cases where the number of posts is zero?
Ideally the list of behaviors which trigger suspicion would be expanded over time, yes? Low hanging for first, just because it’s easy doesn’t mean spammers will program around it unless we check for it.
Looks like a very cool project, thanks for building it and sharing!
Based on the formula you mentioned here, it sounds like an instance with one user who has posted at least one comment will have a maximum score of 1. Presumably the threshold would usually be set to greater than 1, to catch instances with lots of accounts that have never commented.
This has given me another thought though: could spammers not just create one instance per spam account? If you own something like blah.xyz, you could in theory create ephemeral spam instances on subdomains and blast content out using those (e.g. spamuser@esgdf.blah.xyz, spamuser@ttraf.blah.xyz, etc.)
Spam management on the Fediverse is sure to become an interesting issue. I wonder how practical the instance blocking approach will be - I think eventually we’ll need some kind of portable “user trustedness” score.
yes, constantly adding new domains and spamming with them is a probably vector, but I’m not quite sure if that works due to how federation works. I am not quite that familiar with the implementations.