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...
- 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)
- Hiring kids in africa and india to create accounts for 2 cents an hour. NEWS POST 1 POST TWO
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- Cleaned up post.
Is this finally an application for a Blockchain?
Some sort of decentralised registry of instance reputation?
Well- we have a centralized registry of instance reputation being worked on and developed right now.
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.
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.