this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025

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Fedigrow

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To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks

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2 Instances are being used for coordinated vote manipulation, and should be defederated. chinese.lol lemmy.doesnotexist.club (hackertalks.com)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by jet@hackertalks.com to c/fedigrow@lemm.ee

54 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The instances being used are

lemmy.doesnotexist.club
chinese.lol

Here is an example of the coordinated downvoting https://hackertalks.com/post/8692093

Of course its a controversial user who got someone angry enough to automated downvoting @DonaldJMusk@lemmy.today

But you can see every post they make gets 53ish downvotes from these two instances, plus some organic ones after a few hours.

Current downvoting Accounts

bot-list

A individual user airing their personal biases and manipulating lemmy isn't good for the community, regardless of how you feel about their target. This is a really bad thing (tm)

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 50 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Thank you for investigating

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 50 points 1 week ago

Yeah, I was scrolling new and saw some science posts with 50 downvotes... and I couldnt figure out why people were so triggered... so I started digging.

There are lots of gaslighting opportunities presented by social media.

[–] MelodiousFunk@slrpnk.net 32 points 1 week ago (3 children)

This highlights one of the things that I saw as a benefit when I started on kbin: being able to see who the downvote fairies were. I know the discussion has been done to death on the Lemmy side, but as a user I found it interesting to be able to see this kind of info. For example, instead of just block/reporting the spammer, I could block their sock puppets that upvoted as well. (And did kbin.social have a lot of that towards the end. Oof.)

Thanks for digging into this.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Lemmy currently allows mods to see downvotes, so they can fight brigading on top of admins

[–] MelodiousFunk@slrpnk.net 9 points 1 week ago

Visibility is a good thing.

[–] sneezycat@sopuli.xyz 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You mean admins, right? I cannot see downvotes on the community I mod.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Use https://tesseract.dubvee.org/

What it does look like (there were no downvotes here, but they would appear as well)

[–] rustyfish@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

That’s pretty neat to have as a mod. But I don’t think it should be readily available for any average Joe.

Sometimes people are looking for anything to get angry about, myself included. And I really don’t want to get into a slap fight with someone whose dick pic I downvoted.

[–] lena@gregtech.eu 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The data itself is public, clients just don't show it. Imo clients should add that capability, the lack of privacy is better than the illusion of privacy.

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

It's not exactly public, IIRC? Like, admins/mods have access, so it's not private by any means, but I wouldn't really call it public.

[–] lena@gregtech.eu 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967

Due to the way federation works, it is public. Anyone could spin up an instance and make a tool to make votes public.

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's what I meant by admins/mods, thus I still think my point is still valid: not private, but not exactly public.

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[–] Ajen@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago

Anyone can set up a server, make themselves an admin, and federate with other servers. That's what makes it decentralized.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 week ago

Indeed, which is why it's limited to mods

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[–] jet@hackertalks.com 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There is some interesting area here, like a personalized vote score, based on others who vote similar to you, giving them more weight then people you never agree with.

net-net I think open votes make for better neighbors.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 9 points 1 week ago

PieFed has some interesting thoughts along these lines.

I actively expect to never see such a thing in Lemmy though.

[–] rhythmisaprancer@moist.catsweat.com 2 points 1 week ago

I never realized that was a kbin only thing. I just assumed my instance/mbin blocked that feature.

[–] asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev 19 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The attacker is the admin of these two instances. Both instances have their registrations closed.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

When I look, both have open registrations and don't even have a captcha? You see registrations as closed?

[–] asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

It could be that Fediseer is outdated. I looked at the instance's fediseer page.

https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/chinese.lol

https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/lemmy.doesnotexist.club

Edit: Their registrations are indeed open. Perhaps they opened it just now?

Though it is also suspicious why the owner leaves the registrations open, requires no captcha, no approval nor any email confirmation, and the admin of lemmy.doesnotexist.club has been inactive since their account creation. Seems suspicious to me.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They have both had open registrations for at least several hours. I think perhaps there's something wrong with Fediseer's detection?

Given the issues, I'm guessing these instances have been open for some time. lemmy.doesnotexist.club has definitely had a few "Nicole" accounts and some trolls.

[–] asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I checked the web archive. The registrations have been open since 2023. I think it's safe to assume that the admin is indeed the one behind this and possibly also behind the nicole spam. And it has been a year since these bot accounts were created and they are still being created, the admin does nothing, does not interact with anyone, but still hosts the instance.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230809200352/https://lemmy.doesnotexist.club

We desperately need some system to fight against these type of attacks. It is still not much of a problem. Creating bot accounts and then spamming the entire Fediverse isn't hard but defending against it will be in the future.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Why do you assume the admin is behind it? If you have an instance that has open registrations and no captcha, then bots will take advantage of that. It doesn't mean the admin is the one doing the attacks.

In fact, such instances are more common than they should be since open registrations with no captcha is the default configuration, last I checked 😑

[–] INHALE_VEGETABLES@aussie.zone 4 points 1 week ago

.lol

[–] threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Not sure if this community was the best place to post this, but yeah, that seems like a bad thing. Thanks for pointing it out. I do find it funny how most of the bot names follow the AdjectiveNounNumber format.

Lemmings of all instances, you may want to let your local admins know of this potential issue.

Here's a link to the megathread of support/meta communities for each instance: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/40519876

You should be able to find your instance's support/meta community in the list and cross-post OP's post to it.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

At this point I would probably just link this post on the Lemmy Defense HQ Matrix chat, most of the admins are there

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[–] jet@hackertalks.com 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I was trying to think of the right community for this... its not fedidrama, I want to target moderators and admins... is there a better community?

[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

We need a lemmyadmin community.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There's already a chat Matrix where admins coordinate

[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I saw in a comment you made, but one where discussions could be public would be nice.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Discussions are public, everyone can join that chat.

Edit: LW announcement: https://lemmy.world/post/5041072

[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

None of the links there are letting me in,

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Just DM'd you on Matrix, let's see how we can make this work

[–] fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago (3 children)

If you're talking about the defense room, it's invite only. I can invite @irelephant@lemm.ee if needed

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Ah, makes sense, I didn't notice. There are a lot of people there, I assumed it was public

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[–] Squorlple@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago

The list of accounts is helpful. I’m going to copy+paste an idea that I had suggested elsewhere previously that someone with the means to achieve could set up to help fight these bot/astro-turf accounts:

If feasible, I think the best option would be an instance that functions similarly to how Reddit’s now defunct r/BotDefense operated and instances which want to filter out bots would federate with that. Essentially, if there is an account that is suspect of being a bot, users could submit that account to this bot defense server and an automated system would flag obvious bots whereas less obvious bots would have to be inspected manually by informed admins/mods of the server. This flagging would signal to the federated servers to ban these suspect/confirmed bot accounts. This instance would also be able to flag when a particular server is being overrun by bots and advise other servers to temporarily defederate.

There are some other ideas in that comment too, but this one is the most relevant.

[–] rustyfish@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago

Great work. It doesn’t matter who the target is this time (pretty sure I blocked them every time they popped up with a new account). This kind of shit should not be tolerated at all.

[–] ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago

lemmy . doesnotexist . club is where all those Nicole pictures are linked from for some reason.

[–] arakhis_@feddit.org 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

what does defederated mean?

like trusted instance admins to block untrusted ones (like the ones in the post) from showing all content/interactions on the trusted instance so users dont interact with them - like server block?

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 9 points 1 week ago

Yep, exactly that. It's a little more complex, thus the different term (defederation), but from user-perspective it's exactly that: a server block.

[–] Nougat@fedia.io 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

@jerry@fedia.io

[–] jerry@fedia.io 6 points 1 week ago

Thanks

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Current federation status:

[–] TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week ago

@kersploosh@sh.itjust.works I think this is something you should look at as SJW is under the federated list

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[–] JokeDeity@lemm.ee 4 points 1 week ago

Men. Tough. I agree it shouldn't be allowed, but I can't find a shred of sympathy for Nazis.

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