This spammer created multiple accounts on various Lemmy instances to post self advertisements. How do we combat this?
Cloudless@kbin.social to 
Fediverse@kbin.social – 0 points – 
Cloudless@kbin.social to Fediverse@kbin.social – 0 points – Cloudless@kbin.social to Fediverse@kbin.social – 0 points –
I don't know if this is quite the same thing, but @kersploosh was waging a war on bot accounts. Maybe they have some inside or can come up with something in conjunction with the admins.
Edit: that's @kersploosh @sh.itjust.works in case the one here is someone else.
We have a bigger problem and it's popularity. Some instances will want to become as big as possible, for resell value.
So they will be encouraged to let the maximum of people registering a new account, including bots and spammers. Because they make the numbers and they start the snowball effect.
Didn't you all looked a the most populated instances/magazine when you registered magz, and you didn't care about the mags with zero activity? Well, you are encouraging the process in a way.
People will be reluctant to defederate or to ban popular magazines from other subs. So the float of spammers is unlikely to stop, because the person who makes the decision, the admin of the instance, will welcome them. And you won't ban the instance or the mag.
We have to become more like a club.
What’s the resell value of an instance?
The value of an instance is a function of the number of his registered users.
Facebook bought Instagram for the price of ~$30 per user.
Yeah, sure for ad revenue.
Fediverse hasn't been monetized though, so there's no expected ad revenue. Patreons and other donations are not revenue.
You are basically just buying a bunch of hosting costs
Facebook bought the adoption, they bought the users.
So none of that applies to fedi then. Can’t buy up users because we’re federated and can’t buy up competition, because we’re a just fart in Sahara in comparison, both in numbers of people and in revenue dollars
And since there’s no privacy here he can datamine the shit out of content already
Do you understand what siphoning business means? What business do you think Facebook is in? It wasn't users. It was ads.
About tree fiddy
Whatever someone wants to pay for the kind of exposure this gives them.
It doesn't provide them any exposure though.
On the surface, you are correct. Think a little more insidiously and you'll start to see where the value comes in.
Let's say a person with ties to the Coca Cola corporation buys a popular instance. They are in control of that instance including where instance wide rules get enforced or not. It would be unwise to openly spout pro-Coca Cola messages and ban dissenters, so they'll be sneakier about it.
They'll create bot instances that create, upvote and boost posts and downvote dissenters, not enough to stick out, but enough to manipulate the feed algorithms early in the posts lifetime. And occasionally upvote and downvote some random posts to add noise to the user history. Otherwise, they let the instance run as it always has.
There will be accusations, but because it won't be provable or actionable outside of defederation or the banning of individual accounts. And other instances will hesitate to do the former because these accusations are not proven and the instance is still putting out content that their users are interacting with.
If the compromised instance admin needs to put out a fig leaf or two, they can ban the bot accounts and silently create more later.
You can do this without owning the instance though?
You can, but owning the instance removes a lot of complications and people who can interfere. Who's gonna remove your bots from the instance once reported? You?
Owning the instance means you set the rules, both written and unwritten, and you're the one who can selectively enforce them.
You may still need to play politics with other instances but that's nothing a policy of plausible deniability wont see you through
If you're doing it enough that others interfere? You're going to lose all value in your instance as users leave and go elsewhere. You just wasted money on something you could have accomplished for a lot less, (and at least when that fails, you can do it again elsewhere).
You're better off just creating your own instance and posting elsewhere and changing your domain when defederated too much. Much cheaper, more effective, and much more reach.
Edit: I'm really disliking that all these conspiracy theories are forcing me to think of much less expensive ways for corporations to exploit the fediverse. That it hasn't happened is likely a sign the fediverse just isn't a big enough target as a whole or simply that they'd have no way to track the effectiveness.