I’m new to the fediverse, and so far, I have been seeing some situations from lemmy instances rejecting users to defederating from others, but I ask myself: what can be done if trolls or bots come from self-hosted single-user instances?
I don’t usually make a habit of being an ass, but I am extra careful about what I say because I choose to self host. Since any instance admin that decides not to take a liking to me could take one look at my instance and defederate me without a second thought. If anything, self-hosting makes you more vulnerable than just normally ban evading on an open instance.
They get defederated wherever they get consistently banned…and then they can federate with their friends and make their community of shit and yell at each other or something.
Can it be practical if several instances get created programmatically?
Well, if we had a DDOS-like barrage of troll instances, probably a solution would be to institute a “pending federation request” for any new communities.
This should be the default in the next Lemmy version because otherwise it’s only going to get easier for people to launch new instances and it’s going to get too overwhelming
I believe there is a whitelist mode, that isn’t currently enabled but in that mode new instances are defederated by default. That would be a pain to administer for all the small instances joining, so they may set some size rules to apply for federation (??). I imagine this is inevitable if automated instance spamming becomes a problem, unless some type of RBL comes in vogue for managing federation first. It may become impossible to manage manually.
E: oh the white list thing may only be relevant to kbin federation, as that was the topic I saw it in. Sometimes I forget where I am :-/
No, you were correct - Lemmy’s admin settings has an
Allowed Instancessetting, which acts as an allowlist for federation. If you put an instance (or more, separated by,'s) then your instance will only federate with the ones specified in that list.
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Instance admins can blacklist & whitelist other instances from federating with theirs. If you have a lot of bot spam originating from a particular server, you can just add them to the blacklist to prevent them from interacting with yours.
I agree with Jamie. While it is certainly possible for a bad actor to spin up burner instances for the purposes of evading defederation, that’s a disproportionate amount of effort compared to just creating a new account somewhere that already exists.
Will we see it happen? Probably. But it honestly seems easier to deal with than if those bad actors were to hide themselves in established instances.
Assuming you can block a top level domain and have it apply to all subdomains, doing so would force the troll to pay for another domain to get around the block. That could add up to quite the expense.
