Hello again,
Once again we're being bombarded with DMs from spam accounts calling themselves the 'Fediverse Chick' and using the name Nicole. We believe this spam is intended to be some kind of revenge and/or harassment as there is some evidence that Nicole may be a real person who's devices have been hacked. For this reason we've decided to take more drastic measures to block the spammer from reaching our members.
Starting today we will be defederating from instances being used for spam attacks.
We believe the main attack vector for the spammer to be instances with open registrations. By defederating the instances the attacker is using we should slowly be able to wall them out. The vast majority of these instances are extremely small so the impact should be minimal for everyone. If your instance gets blocked and you'd like to continue browsing our content, please ask your instance admins to change their registration policy.
Our suggestion is for all instances to enable captcha for registration as a bare minimum line of defense. Manual approval is even better but adds a lot of extra work for admins of busy instances. If we can increase the time/cost/barrier of entry for the spammer, the attacks should become less frequent.
Lemmy doesn't have a lot of tools for handling these type of attacks and this isn't a step we take lightly. If it turns out defederating is ineffective we'll go back to how things were. Hopefully future versions of Lemmy will feature more robust admin and moderation tools, but for now this is the best we can do to get things stopped quickly. PLEASE use the report feature when you receive new messages from the spammer so that we can continue to block their alts.
Thank you.