The instances being used are
- lemmy.doesnotexist.club
- chinese.lol
Here is an example of the coordinated downvoting https://hackertalks.com/post/8692093
Of course its a controversial user who got someone angry enough to automated downvoting @DonaldJMusk@lemmy.today
But you can see every post they make gets 53ish downvotes from these two instances, plus some organic ones after a few hours.
Current downvoting Accounts
bot-list
LightIsland@chinese.lol MagnificentRow@chinese.lol FondKnowledge@chinese.lol SillyTowel95@chinese.lol HelplessDear@chinese.lol SomberBrain@chinese.lol InexperiencedCloset@chinese.lol NecessaryPerson11@chinese.lol ClosedEmployment@chinese.lol CoarseHair420@chinese.lol BurlyChampionship49@chinese.lol ZigzagNatural@chinese.lol QuestionableDirt@chinese.lol ProudDeparture@lemmy.doesnotexist.club JoyousDouble@chinese.lol UnitedPatience@chinese.lol MajesticArea@lemmy.doesnotexist.club SinfulConference@chinese.lol MoralDivide96@chinese.lol LeadingCarry65@chinese.lol FrillyOpinion38@lemmy.doesnotexist.club LimitedDiscount49@lemmy.doesnotexist.club ForkedScreen@chinese.lol MediumChemistry13@chinese.lol xXxLawfulGrassxXx@lemmy.doesnotexist.club VisibleSentence@chinese.lol AcidicLawyer90@lemmy.doesnotexist.club PriceySink14@lemmy.doesnotexist.club ExcellentBeach@chinese.lol VivaciousNews@lemmy.doesnotexist.club LankyIndependent32@lemmy.doesnotexist.club SpeedyFault@chinese.lol ConcreteHall89@lemmy.doesnotexist.club WorthyPoint12@lemmy.doesnotexist.club SurprisedAdult99@chinese.lol FlashyCrack@lemmy.doesnotexist.club MasculineBeing@chinese.lol RichWeird@lemmy.doesnotexist.club DryCash97@lemmy.doesnotexist.club AuthorizedChair@chinese.lol SlimKiss@lemmy.doesnotexist.club AromaticRoof78@lemmy.doesnotexist.club BewitchedInterview@lemmy.doesnotexist.club ImaginaryDraw@lemmy.doesnotexist.club PertinentGround@chinese.lol SinfulAssumption@lemmy.doesnotexist.club AwkwardAnybody30@lemmy.doesnotexist.club UnwillingRestaurant@lemmy.doesnotexist.club InsubstantialOven@lemmy.doesnotexist.club
A individual user airing their personal biases and manipulating lemmy isn’t good for the community, regardless of how you feel about their target. This is a really bad thing ™
It could be that Fediseer is outdated. I looked at the instance’s fediseer page.
https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/chinese.lol
https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/lemmy.doesnotexist.club
Edit: Their registrations are indeed open. Perhaps they opened it just now?
Though it is also suspicious why the owner leaves the registrations open, requires no captcha, no approval nor any email confirmation, and the admin of lemmy.doesnotexist.club has been inactive since their account creation. Seems suspicious to me.
They have both had open registrations for at least several hours. I think perhaps there’s something wrong with Fediseer’s detection?
Given the issues, I’m guessing these instances have been open for some time. lemmy.doesnotexist.club has definitely had a few “Nicole” accounts and some trolls.
I checked the web archive. The registrations have been open since 2023. I think it’s safe to assume that the admin is indeed the one behind this and possibly also behind the nicole spam. And it has been a year since these bot accounts were created and they are still being created, the admin does nothing, does not interact with anyone, but still hosts the instance.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230809200352/https://lemmy.doesnotexist.club
We desperately need some system to fight against these type of attacks. It is still not much of a problem. Creating bot accounts and then spamming the entire Fediverse isn’t hard but defending against it will be in the future.
Why do you assume the admin is behind it? If you have an instance that has open registrations and no captcha, then bots will take advantage of that. It doesn’t mean the admin is the one doing the attacks.
In fact, such instances are more common than they should be since open registrations with no captcha is the default configuration, last I checked 😑