This has been brewing for some time and the original plan was to only hide them from the “All” feed so that they would not pollute our member curated federated feed, but the feature to do so is sadly very inaccessible in Lemmy (hidden as a admin only API command that isn’t exposed in the UI, making it a real hassle to use).

But these days these bot spam instances started to take up a lot of space on the federated feed, so I feel like full defederation is warranted now.

The bot spam instances identified so far are:

Additionally there are some bot accounts that are solely reposting RSS feeds and thus should also be banned:

This is a work in progress list. Feel free to suggest additional bot spam instances or accounts here in the comments. Thanks.

P.S.: If you run a individual RSS post bot for a community you moderate here on SLRPNK and it isn’t spamming the federated feed with an excessive amount of posts, then there is no need to remove it.

  • henfredemars@infosec.pubEnglish
    28·
    3 days ago

    Although this is not my home instance, I just want to say: thank you for helping to make the fediverse great.

  • mark@programming.devEnglish
    7·
    3 days ago

    Been complaining about the RSS bots for years. They pollute feeds and search results too. If people want to see RSS feed content, just subscribe to it in your RSS reader.

  • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    3 days ago

    lemmy.durstig.online has nothing but Reddit repost bot communities.

    I will say that the news.abolish.capital bot is at least posting things that I don’t see duplicated anywhere else. The blatantly-partisan name gives me pause every time I see it, but the content is often fairly interesting.

    I don’t have as much of an opinion on the other two, which I guess is its own argument against defederation since I haven’t noticed them enough for it to bother me.

    'Course, I’m not even a member of this instance, so feel free to ignore my opinion. But if I did have my way, I’d like for my instance to defederate lemmy.durstig.online and probably leave the others alone, at least for now.

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPMEnglish
      6·
      3 days ago

      Thanks and added to the list.

      We intentionally are a smaller themed instance that doesn’t interact with any bots that fill the federated feed with posts from other instances automatically. This results in our “All” feed being much more usable than on other instances, but it also requires some curation if a single member decides to subscribe to a high post volume bot driven community as that drowns out all the organic posts shared by real users.

  • RobotToaster@mander.xyzEnglish
    5·
    3 days ago

    but the feature to do so is sadly very inaccessible in Lemmy (hidden as a admin only API command that isn’t exposed in the UI, making it a real hassle to use).

    Is it known if this will be fixed in 1.0? It may be worth holding off until then if so.

  • nocturne@slrpnk.netEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    Alien.top is another instance that reposts reddit content via bots. Theoretically reddit users can then take over the account that created for them to use on Lemmy, but I have never seen a human post from that instance.

      • nocturne@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        No idea actually, I instance blocked it as soon as I could. I remember some days there being pages of posts from there in /all.

      • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPMEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        Ah, that link actually loads. Earlier when I checked it was the wrong domain or so. But yeah, seems completely dead and mostly abandoned.

        • nocturne@slrpnk.netEnglish
          1·
          2 days ago

          Yeah I could not remember the actual domain. I edited my original comment. Sorry about that.

  • NightFantom@slrpnk.netEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    How does lemmy work with federation? Can you get filtered federation (e.g. if you ban a bot user, do their posts still federate)? I feel like this is a very harsh “baby out with the bathwater” kind of solution, but if there’s no middle road, then I trust your judgement that defederation is preferable, at least short-term.

    Actually, do any of the other fediverse platforms allow things like this? I think I heard you were looking into moving to piefed for instance?

    Or can custom code run on import to filter at that step?

    If I can “donate” some programming skills I’d love to help out. I’m mostly working with python these days but I’ve done elixir and c++ so I’ll be able to wrap my head around most things with a bit of effort. It’ll mostly be finding the time I guess. Otherwise I’ll gladly backseat drive from the comments like this 😅

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPMEnglish
      7·
      3 days ago

      The point with defederation would be really that these instances have no real users and only consist of bot communities, so banning the bots from these instances individually would make little sense.

      In general I think if you just want to use a RSS feed reader or alternative frontend for Reddit, then you should do so and not abuse Lemmy for this purpose, especially since it degrades the experience for other people on the same instance.

      • NightFantom@slrpnk.netEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        But I like having my rss feed reader and lemmy in one place! No I see your point and I agree, fair enough.

        • mark@programming.devEnglish
          2·
          3 days ago

          You can just subscribe to Lemmy in your RSS reader. Then you’ll still have it in one place: your RSS reader. :)