Hello everyone. We recently defederated from the two instances below. In the interest of transparency, I am opening this discussion post as a place for our users to discuss any questions or concerns.
- chinese.lol
- lemmy.doesnotexist.club
Both instances were identified in a recent post (https://hackertalks.com/post/8713785) for harboring suspected vote manipulation accounts. The spoiler in that post names 49 suspicious accounts. A bit of database digging on our side confirmed that all of those accounts are being used solely for coordinated downvoting of a small number of Lemmy users. They are also only the tip of the iceberg; at least 92 other accounts on these two instances also match the same pattern of behavior.
We have reached out to the admins, and have not received a reply. Until we hear otherwise, these two instances are considered unmoderated and have been defederated.
That is all. Have a great Friday!
Any interesting patterns in the users being systematically targeted for downvotes? Wondering if this is personal grudge or enemy action, basically.
The targeted accounts are all outspoken users with very similar political opinions. I assume whoever is running the downvote accounts doesn’t like their politics.
That sounds totally reasonable. Thanks for handling it well.
Good work and good comms.
Yeah I think defederation is probably a good idea here, especially given the fact that these instances in addition to being used primarily for vote manipulation, seemingly also have no legitimate engagement whatsoever. Can’t think of any reason why we shouldn’t really.
Sounds like a good call, thanks admin team.
Thanks for the transparency. Always sad to see a defederation but this seems justified. Thank you for your work mods
Sounds good to me - thanks for looking out!
Thanks for the update.
