Lemmy.world is temporarily disabling open signups and moving to an application-required signup process, due to ongoing issues with malicious bot accounts.
We know this is a major step to take, but we believe that it’s the right one for both us and our community right now.
We’re working on a better long-term technical solution to these bots, but that will take time to create, test, and verify that it doesn’t cause any problems with federation and how our users use our site, and we’d rather make sure we get it right than have a site that’s broken.
We’re making this change on 28 Aug 2023, and don’t have a specific timeline for how long registrations will require an application, but we will post an update once our new anti-abuse measures are in place and working.
Take care, LW Team
Nah. The risk greatly outweighs the reward.
Does it? Standard dark web precautions are more than enough to throw any investigation into a dead end, especially for a one-off transaction with the buyer having little to no other activity.
The fediverse is simply not really ready to compete with established actors.
Yet. The Fediverse isn’t ready to compete yet. Business people aren’t looking purely at the present, they’ve got a keen eye on the foreseeable future too. If there is a growing momentum towards the fediverse, that can spell trouble for Reddit in 5 years time. The entire point of such an attack is to derail momentum on the platforms. By the time they are ready to compete, it’s much too late for this kind of attack to have any reasonable effect.
The more intelligent solution is what Meta is doing with Threads. Not something like this. There’d be a lot more money blackmailing the company than to mess with CSAM.
Big corps are a lot sneakier than something so blunt.
There’d be a lot more money blackmailing the company than to mess with CSAM.
There isn’t a company to blackmail. You can’t treat the Fediverse as a competing company because it isn’t one. You have to treat it more like a movement, like Occupy Wall Street
How do you derail a movement? You make sure the participants are slandered to the point that your accusations are the main things people on the outside remember of it. Mainstream Media did this with Occupy successfully.
However this doesn’t work if your opponent is too big, too established or too well funded. Microsoft tried to do this with the Open Source Movement, but the latter was too well established and funded for it to work.
Big corps are a lot sneakier than something so blunt.
That’s the thing, they’re not being blunt at all. Literally anybody can pay for this kind of attack to happen and not even the service provider needs to know who the buyer is.
The only thing that is needed now are media hitpieces about how federated services spread CSAM and you’ve got damage that could make the YouTube adpocalypse look small.
Didn’t say blackmail the fediverse. I’m saying blackmail the company trying to spread CSAM.
And again, you don’t derail a movement. You try to own it if you really care.
But even then, it’s not worth it. XMPP has been “competing” for far longer and likely had more success up front than Lemmy or Kbin.
You’re severely overestimating the potential here. And you’re severely overestimating how much a company would want to destroy it instead of exploiting any other success. There’s money to be lost in paying to derail it. There’s money to be made in exploiting it.
