Lemmy

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Comment spam attacks in multiple /c's by Thuleanxxx (lemmy.ml)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by zabadoh@lemmy.ml to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

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There have been a number of comment spam attacks in various posts in a couple of /c's that I follow by a user/individual who uses account names like Thulean*

For example: ThuleanSneed@lemmy.tf in !coffee@lemmy.world

and ThuleanPerspective2@eviltoast.org in !anime@ani.social

edit: Also ThuleanSneed@startrek.website in !startrek@startrek.website

The posts have been removed or deleted by the respective /c's mods, and the offending accounts banned, but you can see the traces of them in those /c's modlogs.

The comments consist of an all-caps string of words with profanities, and Simpsons memes.

An attack on a post may consist of several repeated or similar looking comments.

This looks like a bored teenager prank, but it may also be an organization testing Lemmy's systemic and collective defenses and ability to respond against spam and bot posts.

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[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I highly doubt it's an org attack, Lemmy just isn't popular enough to see something like that.

I don't know if Lemmy has the ability to shadow ban, but those can be pretty effective for cases like this. It obviously wouldn't help with a botnet attack, but it would help with your average, run of the mill pranksters.

[–] zabadoh@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It's part of the ol' Big Tech playbook:

If a promising emerging competitor emerges:

Acquire the emerging competitor for cheap when it's still small
Copy the competitor's best features to make them irrelevant
Co-opt them with integration so the competitor's users won't see any advantage to staying with them
Pollute the competitor's content to make your own offering look better
Steal the competitor's best talent

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 7 months ago

I mean it's possible, but lemmy only has ~50k monthly active users. Reddit, on the other hand, is in the millions (>400M monthly active users last year, and >50M daily active users). Lemmy just isn't anywhere in the ballpark of being a threat to anyone.

I also think Lemmy has some architectural issues that will make it very difficult to scale to anywhere near Reddit size, even if it somehow gets the users.

It's a cool service, I just highly doubt it's the target of any big campaign. And that's a big part of why I'm here, it's big enough to have interesting communities, but small enough to avoid most of the spam.