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.
Fun fact, they’re removing Captcha in the next release.
I won’t be upgrading and I anticipate I’ll be defederating with any instance that upgrades to v0.18.
Source - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2922
That is true, but because of the recent spam wave there is also an issue to re-add captcha. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3200
We’ll just have to see how it all shakes out.