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

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founded 11 months ago

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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 [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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 @[email protected]

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)

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days 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It could be that Fediseer is outdated.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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days 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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days 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 😑

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago

.lol