If you look at the top ~20 servers on fedidb, they are very clearly botswarms. Either intentionally set up that way, or accidentally due to turning off protections and not deleting users.
You can tell this because they have 70,000 registered users, but only 10 of them are active.
I believe we should pre-emptively defederate with botswarms before they’re turned on. If the instance owners clear out the bots on their instances (like lemmy.ninja did) then they should be immediately refederated.
I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t want this place to be drowned in spam as soon as they’re activated.
Thank you for your input. You’ve obviously thought a lot about this and are bringing a lot to the table.
Personally, priority number one is removing the low-hanging fruit. Once we’ve done that, we can think about more complex goals in terms of how to defend ourselves against more complex bots. We need to start here though, and soon.
Of course and thank you. I agree completely. I think going forward, that instance admins who are utilizing a defense-in-depth strategy with tools like Lemmy Overseer, automated account creation hurdles, and other emergent tools (one example) will be the most effective in keeping this part of the federation largely free of the bot-swarm.