Since early December, someone has created 65+ accounts with variations of the same name, and they have used those accounts for vote manipulation.
We reached out to the admin of the instance 4 weeks ago, recommending that they enable registration applications, upgrade the captcha difficulty, and/or require an email address to prevent this. We have not received a reply.
When we checked the logs this week, we saw that a new chain of accounts was created. This is creating extra work for our admin team to find and ban these accounts.
Defederation will block the instance, their communities, and their users from everyone on lemmy.ca and piefed.ca. Similarly, it will block content from lemmy.ca and piefed.ca from going to their instance.
Currently, less than 10 users from lemmy.ca are subscribed to a community there, the majority of which are subscribed to 1 community max.
You can view their communities here: https://lemmy.org/communities
Please share your feedback about this action in this thread.
No objections. It looks like a small instance. Can refederate if improved.
The admin seems related to some AI ad tech firm. Also I’m curious how they got lemmy.org. It was registered in 2020. I imagine it was registered speculatively.
I found a mastodon account with the same tagline. Everything including the avatar, uploaded media and toots seem to be AI generated.
Seems we won’t be losing anything of value from defederating, then. That shit doesn’t belong here.