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Introducing The Lemmy Overseer (overseer.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 year ago by db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/technology

52 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/95652

Hey everyone, you may have noticed that some of us have been raising alarms about the amount of spam accounts being created on insufficiently protected instances.

As I wanted to get ahead of this before we're shoulders deep in spam, I developed a small service which can be used to parse the Lemmy Fediverse Observer and retrieve instances which are suspicious enough to block.

The Overseer provides fully documented REST API which you can use to retrieve the instances in 3 different formats. One with all the info, one with just the names, and one as a csv you can copy-paste into your defederation setting. You can even adjust the level of suspicion you want to have.

Not only that, I also developed a python script which you can edit and run and it will automatically update your defederation list. You can set that baby to run on a daily schedule and it will take care that any new suspicious instances are also caught and any servers that cleared up their spam accounts will be recovered.

I plan to improve this service further. Feel free to send me ideas and PRs.

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[–] Leafimo@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

maybe that's a dumb question, so sorry for that, but wouldn't it be easier to just use a whitelist for federation instead of a blocklist?

[–] wintrparkgrl 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That would lead to having to manually approve every instance by the admins. Mods can't do that so it would 100% be on them to keep up with all the instances

[–] Leafimo@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

undefined> Leaf

I see, yeah that would be close to impossible in the long run... Thanks for the info!

[–] admin_lemmy@lemmy.webgirand.eu 16 points 1 year ago

Mostly because it would invalidate any single user self hosted instance, which I fin is one of the big draws of the fediverse in general.