I am happy to contribute! I think it's time for me to move on from Reddit. I am excited to help this platform grow and become something great - I just need to become less of a lurker.
It does seem a little out of balance. We should ask @gaylord how/why they're personally reviewed 38,000 email-less sign up statements in under 7 days and who they think is populating his server (according to one of his posts from a week ago).
(not sure my tag syntax was correct.... maybe @gaylord autolinking works?)
I mean, this just stinks of bots. This made it real easy to at least spot them. All those signups and not a single post? I agree with the notion of contacting the instance admin. They may be completely unaware that a swarm of bots signed up on the instance.
I ended up there/here thanks to a "guide for redditors" that suggested it as a good instance to start with. That particular guide was at the top of the Google results when researching lemmy.
Unfortunately I don't have much faith in this social network until the bot issue is addressed. There is a huge contingent of spambots just waiting for their moments here.
Spam bots or spam servers? Everyone is saying regulate signups for servers but anyone can spin up a Lemmy server and spam with thousands of accounts until they are defedarated. Then 5 minutes later do it again with a new server. It’s not hard to setup a Lemmy server.
I actually think this is a non-issue , sure it will be a pain for a while but the decentralized model will easily adapt to this IMO. Its not like reddit was immune from bots eh.
The federation could be some sort of "democracy" - meaning that new servers should have to apply to join, and the choice would be up to all the other server owners. Otherwise spam servers will become a great issue. This is something that could be implemented later on, if done now it may slow down the growing curve.
In other words, I suggest the creation of a sub-federation that has this moderation system, the unmoderated wild would continue to exist. This would potentially create other issues tho, and it's something that needs a lot of thought put into.
Maybe it would be better to implement features in lemmy that detect suspicious servers and automatically blacklists them. Maybe creating sub-federations would mess up even more the ecosystem.
But the bots most likely exist in huge amounts here and in other consolidated servers too and IMO thats the biggest problem. Reddit has a shitton of features designed to mitigate the bot issue. It's one of the hardests things to solve in current internet.
Yeah, a nice feature of federation is that real communities can adjust their sign-up processes to minimize bot sign-ups, and while determined botfarms can spin up their own servers, that leads to pretty much the least controversial use case for admins to block another server.
Mastodon's run into similar issues in the past with both bots and scrapers and typically no one has any issue with admins there defederating and entirely blocking those servers.
Which is why it's great that the bottom of every single page, on every single lemmy instance, there's a button to take you to the modlog. It shows what servers have been defederated and when. So if the person running your instance is being too heavy-handed with it, you can take your account and move to a different instance.
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I like this way of putting it. It’s like that post that was around a few days ago discussing lemmy as being “CEO-proof”.
It’s not really I guess, but if an instance got big and started being unfriendly/unreasonable to users they could just go to another instance and still be part of the federation.
If it gets too much they can just stop letting people join, can't they? I think for the beginning a little bit of centralizing will make stuff easier. For the long run it might be less desirable.
The upside is join-lemmy.org always puts the smaller but growing instances at the top to somewhat distribute the load for new users. Also there are new general purpose instances popping up, I quite like it and as long as there is no drama you can access most of the Fediverse from almost any instance.
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