cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/177673
Today, a bunch of new instances appeared in the top of the user count list. It appears that these instances are all being bombarded by bot sign-ups.
For now, it seems that the bots are especially targeting instances that have:
- Open sign-ups
- No captcha
- No e-mail verification
I have put together a spreadsheet of some of the most suspicious cases here.
If this is affecting you, I would highly recommend considering one of the following options:
- Close sign-ups entirely
- Only allow sign-ups with applications
- Enable e-mail verification + captcha for sign-ups
Additionally, I would recommend pre-emptively banning as many bot accounts as possible, before they start posting spam!
Please comment below if you have any questions or anything useful to add.
Yeah it seems like many of the older instances are already protecting themselves.
https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse
If you go to the top 20 fastest growing servers, they are all empty, bot filled servers as far as I can tell.
https://the-federation.info/platform/73#drawer-opened
This site seems to be doing a better job of ignoring the bot accounts, and you can see all the original active instances have only grown a modest amount in the past couple days.
Wow, that’s hundreds of thousands of “users” within two days. It could be software testing or preparing a massive blow.