this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
130 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37738 readers
358 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's based on dynamic count. For now it's a very simple how many users per post there are and each instance can set their own threshold for it.
It's not about few users, it's about a tons of users and no activity. If you have 5000 users and 3 posts, it's likely those are all spam accounts. This is what we're checking for right now.
This is not a manual process currently, but I'm planning to add the possibility to whitelist and blacklist instances manually in the future.
Isn't it trivial for bot farms to just spam posts on their home instance? And how does this handle cases where the number of posts is zero?
Ideally the list of behaviors which trigger suspicion would be expanded over time, yes? Low hanging for first, just because it's easy doesn't mean spammers will program around it unless we check for it.
Looks like a very cool project, thanks for building it and sharing!
Based on the formula you mentioned here, it sounds like an instance with one user who has posted at least one comment will have a maximum score of 1. Presumably the threshold would usually be set to greater than 1, to catch instances with lots of accounts that have never commented.
This has given me another thought though: could spammers not just create one instance per spam account? If you own something like blah.xyz, you could in theory create ephemeral spam instances on subdomains and blast content out using those (e.g. spamuser@esgdf.blah.xyz, spamuser@ttraf.blah.xyz, etc.)
Spam management on the Fediverse is sure to become an interesting issue. I wonder how practical the instance blocking approach will be - I think eventually we'll need some kind of portable "user trustedness" score.
yes, constantly adding new domains and spamming with them is a probably vector, but I'm not quite sure if that works due to how federation works. I am not quite that familiar with the implementations.