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110

Introducing The Lemmy Overseer (overseer.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 year ago by db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/technology@beehaw.org

36 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/95652

Hey everyone, you may have noticed that some of us have been raising alarms about the amount of spam accounts being created on insufficiently protected instances.

As I wanted to get ahead of this before we're shoulders deep in spam, I developed a small service which can be used to parse the Lemmy Fediverse Observer and retrieve instances which are suspicious enough to block.

The Overseer provides fully documented REST API which you can use to retrieve the instances in 3 different formats. One with all the info, one with just the names, and one as a csv you can copy-paste into your defederation setting. You can even adjust the level of suspicion you want to have.

Not only that, I also developed a python script which you can edit and run and it will automatically update your defederation list. You can set that baby to run on a daily schedule and it will take care that any new suspicious instances are also caught and any servers that cleared up their spam accounts will be recovered.

I plan to improve this service further. Feel free to send me ideas and PRs.

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[–] thatcasualgamingguy@lemmy.nerdcore.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's a cool idea. Thanks for your work!

One question: Let's say the script defederates an instance and then the admin of that instance cleans up their database and makes sure no new bots can register. Would your script remove them from the blacklist or would I have to manually check if all instances on my blacklist are still "infested" to give them a second chance?

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

If you run my script in a schedule it should remove them from the defederation list yes

[–] thatcasualgamingguy@lemmy.nerdcore.social 1 points 1 year ago

Oh, now I see it at the end of your post: "... any servers that cleared up their spam accounts will be recovered." Totally missed that. My bad, sorry.

[–] thatcasualgamingguy@lemmy.nerdcore.social 1 points 1 year ago

I see, nice. Thanks for the quick answer!