As some of you may be aware, over the past few weeks there have been an increasing number of what I suspect are bots which will share one or even a few posts, all relevant to the communities they are shared in, at which point the account self-deletes. I’m torn as the stories are relevant, but they give me the impression of a narrative attack. I’ve seen only one of these accounts actually comment before deletion, otherwise they post and immediately nuke the account.
I have tagged mods and admins but have not heard any recognition on the problem. It’s also notable that by my impression this issue is getting worse. I noticed yesterday that communities I subscribe to which previously have not had this problem are now starting to receive these kinds of posts.
I want the fediverse to be a place to communicate with real people in good faith; this manner of posting runs contrary to that. So that begs the questions, is this actually a problem, and if so, what can be done about it?
I want the fediverse to be a place to communicate with real people in good faith
It’s a popularity problem. Once a ‘social network’ gets big enough to spread information to a decent user base, it will be astroturfed. Building a better mousetrap and all that jazz, they will still get through, it doesn’t matter the mitigation strategy you use. The best defense is to engage with others who are respectful, and not engage with those that are clearly rage baiting, circle jerking, promoting a narrative, etc. You will never not see it, the trick is to realize it doesn’t matter at all. Just do you.
Lemmy just released 0.19.14, which addresses this somehow, but the announcement is vague:
https://join-lemmy.org/news/2025-12-08_-_Lemmy_Release_0.19.14
https://discuss.online/post/31855056
Recently some malicious users started to use an exploit where they would post rule violating content and then delete the account. This would prevent admins and mods from viewing the user profile to find other posts, and would also prevent federation of ban actions.
The new release fixes these problems. Thanks to @flamingos-cant for contributing to solve this.
Good to know.
I think this just fixes the bug where deleted accounts were invisible to admins. It’s a start but doesn’t fully address the problem. Still, having it federate the content removal is a step in the right direction.
It’s a start but doesn’t fully address the problem.
Eh, I’d say it addresses everything that matters.
The root of the problem was that deleting the account was an exploit to avoid limit admin research and further actions, and federation of content removal. That’s the only reason they were bothering to do it. The fix allows admins to research properly, and for federation of removal actions.
It doesn’t solve the root of the issue with bad actors, but that’s a much larger issue well beyond the scope of a couple bug fixes.
@flamingos@feddit.uk thank you always for making the fediverse a safer place!
Piefed already automatically has a toggle in its settings that can be activated. On piefed.social any account that self-deletes within 24 hours has all of its posts purged.
This is a lemmy problem.
Good to know, I need to suck it up and just move over to my piefed alt full time.
