We are proposing a defederation from lemmy.org until they update their instance settings to reduce spam signups

Since early December, someone has created 65+ accounts with variations of the same name, and they have used those accounts for vote manipulation.

We reached out to the admin of the instance 4 weeks ago, recommending that they enable registration applications, upgrade the captcha difficulty, and/or require an email address to prevent this. We have not received a reply.

When we checked the logs this week, we saw that a new chain of accounts was created. This is creating extra work for our admin team to find and ban these accounts.

Defederation will block the instance, their communities, and their users from everyone on lemmy.ca and piefed.ca. Similarly, it will block content from lemmy.ca and piefed.ca from going to their instance.

Currently, less than 10 users from lemmy.ca are subscribed to a community there, the majority of which are subscribed to 1 community max.

You can view their communities here: https://lemmy.org/communities

Please share your feedback about this action in this thread.

Seems like a good enough reason to defederate.

Sounds reasonable, thank you for informing us. I support the proposed move.

Go for it. if you're running a lemmy instance and cant manage simple comms between other instance admins you really can't complain if they defederate from you. It doesn't seem very busy either with most of the posts being mirrors of other instances.

I vote yes

Why not? A quick glance shows it’s basically one guy spamming links to…himself?

This is why we can defederate. I’m for it

Okay, thank you for doing this!

No objections. It looks like a small instance. Can refederate if improved.

The admin seems related to some AI ad tech firm. Also I'm curious how they got lemmy.org. It was registered in 2020. I imagine it was registered speculatively.

Don't delay, defed today.

Yes, i agree too. Defederate!

I very much appreciate you communicating about this.

I agree that defederating seems like the right solution.

The admin seems related to some AI ad tech firm

I found a mastodon account with the same tagline. Everything including the avatar, uploaded media and toots seem to be AI generated.

The unfortunate thing is that this has a negative effect on the Lemmy brand, even if not affiliated.

This gets into copyright enforcement territory, though, which I don't know if Lemmy is interested in doing.