 You know what's more concerning than Meta/Threads joining? Bots, like/follow rings, and spam. See, even though Threads doesn't federate yet, they painted a big red target on the fediverse by announcing future support. Those annoying twitter crypto bots and "I made $750 via cashapp" spam on IG are likely going to make there way here. We need to prepare. I'm building a @pixelfed service similar to Akismet to share intelligence in a privacy friendly way, will share more deets soon 😎 14 comments
@pixelfed There is no fediverse project that can detect follow bots or like bots, and doing so would require a lot of data and refactoring for it to be useful, even IG can't do this at scale We can use innovative techniques and behavioural analysis to help detect this, but it remains a challenging problem "Buy mastodon followers" will become an industry of shady services with sleeper accounts on various fediverse instances (they might already exist)  @dansup @pixelfed This is actually a huge issue across all social networks. I remember @th3j35t3r detected fake accounts created on #CounterSocial (https://counter.social) from hostile nations & spam farms last year according to memory. Counter Social suspended the hostile/spam bots (using an algorithm I think) & had all of the accounts manually reviewed to make sure legit accounts were not deleted. It’s a long & tedious process. @dansup @pixelfed follow and like bots are a lot easier to detect then it seems. 1. gather followers for selling it later 2. execute the Spam via Name, Description or pinned post. The first group is not very much annoying for most, as many do not realize its spam.  @dansup Malware follows wherever people go.  @dansup @pixelfed Have you read https://renchap.com/blog/post/evolving_mastodon_trust_and_safety/ on those topics? I think this could fit your vision for Pixelfed as well!   @dansup I’m not sure that Meta will actually federate. Part of me believes they announced it to placate those who are skeptical of Meta and are hoping that people forget. @dansup @pixelfed they already are, already were before the announcement. but for now they are often blocked very fast on instance level. |
Gregory's Server
@pixelfed The fediverse is a victim of its own success in this way, the more users that join, the more of a target for spam and abuse