Lemmy

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For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.

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PSA: Many Lemmy instances are currently experiencing massive automated sign-ups (bots)! If you run an instance with open sign-ups, please read! (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by sunaurus@lemm.ee to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

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Today, a bunch of new instances appeared in the top of the user count list. It appears that these instances are all being bombarded by bot sign-ups.

For now, it seems that the bots are especially targeting instances that have:

Open sign-ups
No captcha
No e-mail verification

I have put together a spreadsheet of some of the most suspicious cases here.

If this is affecting you, I would highly recommend considering one of the following options:

Close sign-ups entirely
Only allow sign-ups with applications
Enable e-mail verification + captcha for sign-ups

Additionally, I would recommend pre-emptively banning as many bot accounts as possible, before they start posting spam!

Please comment below if you have any questions or anything useful to add.

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[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Here we go: https://overseer.dbzer0.com/

API doc: https://overseer.dbzer0.com/api/

curl -X 'GET' \
  'https://overseer.dbzer0.com/api/v1/instances' \
  -H 'accept: application/json'

Will spit out suspicious instances based on fediverse.observer . You can adjust the threshold to your own preference.

[–] sunaurus@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nice! Would be cool if you could also include current statuses of captchas, emails, and application requirements.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Tell me how to fetch them and it will. ;)

[–] sunaurus@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the easiest option is to just iterate through the list of suspicious instances, and then check {instance_url}/api/v3/site for each of them. Relevant keys of the response json are site_view.local_site.captcha_enabled, site_view.local_site.registration_mode, and site_view.local_site.require_email_verification.

Since it's a bunch of separate requests, probably it makes sense to do these in parallel and probably also to cache the results at least for a while.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago

It occurs to me that this kind of thing is better left to observer, as it's set up to poll instances and gather data. I would suggest you ask them to ingest and expose this data as well