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.
99% of fedi instances should require sign-ups with applications and email. It does not make sense to let in users indiscriminately unless you have a 24h staff in charge of moderation.
We’re trying to capture the reddit refugees as well. It’s a fine-line to walk.
Email + Captcha should be doable right?
yes, that’s the bare minimum until we get better toolset
Agreed. An application that must be human reviewed is a very large gate that many people will see and just close the site. Myself included.
Email verification + captcha should be enough. The application part is cringe and a bad idea, unless you really want to be your own small high school clique and don’t have any growth ambitions, which is perfectly fine but again should not be expected from general instances looking to welcome Redditors.