I’ve just blacklisted the instances listed here. Hopefully this means we won’t be receiving more spam for the time being (but do keep reporting if the list turns out to be incomplete)
What I’m incredibly confused about is why they are targeting a singular sub on our instance instead of, for example, flooding every subcommunity.
Yeah confuses me as well. The number of posts is enough to be annoying but because they are in one sub they are easy to control at the same time.
They’re not getting you to look in one place while they do something worse somewhere else, are they?
maybe it’s just a test run to see what happens
The admin of lemm.ee made a writeup on the incident as well.
I see your lemmy-bot library and at least three bots you’ve created from it. Have you considered anything that might tackle this particular rash of spam?
LemmyModBot is Python-based and ought to be able to identify, via perceptual hashing, these spam posts based on the two images they consistently use.
The image hashing would be good to combat this kind of spamwave. The bot would need to have either mod or admin privileges to remove the offending posts.
Having thought about things for only a few minutes, I’m surprised to find that hexbear.net & lemmy.ml & lemmygrad.ml & sdf.org don’t yet have any admin bot accounts to help with global housekeeping tasks. Lemmy.world appears to have one, though I don’t know anything about it.
I’m currently working with some Hexbear mods to make a bot for protecting communities, but it’s only at the level of individual communities as opposed to instance-wide.
At lemmy.ml we’ve blocked around 90 instances, including those listed as threat levels 3-5 here: https://github.com/Mastodon-DE/blocklists/blob/main/spam/2024-02-15/2024-02-15-spam-mute-list.md
yes, as mentioned in the post, we have already blacklisted those instances
