Thank you for investigating
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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Fedigrow
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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.
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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.
Lemmy currently allows mods to see downvotes, so they can fight brigading on top of admins
Visibility is a good thing.
You mean admins, right? I cannot see downvotes on the community I mod.
Use https://tesseract.dubvee.org/
What it does look like (there were no downvotes here, but they would appear as well)
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's what I meant by admins/mods, thus I still think my point is still valid: not private, but not exactly public.
I think it would be better to make it clear that people's votes can be seen by anyone with a little technical skill, better than hiding that fact.
Anyone can set up a server, make themselves an admin, and federate with other servers. That's what makes it decentralized.
Indeed, which is why it's limited to mods
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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.
PieFed has some interesting thoughts along these lines.
I actively expect to never see such a thing in Lemmy though.
I never realized that was a kbin only thing. I just assumed my instance/mbin blocked that feature.
lemmy . doesnotexist . club is where all those Nicole pictures are linked from for some reason.
The attacker is the admin of these two instances. Both instances have their registrations closed.
When I look, both have open registrations and don't even have a captcha? You see registrations as closed?
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.
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.
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.
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 😑
.lol
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.
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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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?
We need a lemmyadmin community.
There's already a chat Matrix where admins coordinate
I saw in a comment you made, but one where discussions could be public would be nice.
Discussions are public, everyone can join that chat.
Edit: LW announcement: https://lemmy.world/post/5041072
None of the links there are letting me in,
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:
There are some other ideas in that comment too, but this one is the most relevant.
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?
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.
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.
Right now the second link returns errors. Probably that instance is down.
Men. Tough. I agree it shouldn't be allowed, but I can't find a shred of sympathy for Nazis.
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