Replying just to say that I agree with this. I’m in queer Discord servers with an order of magnitude less users who have similar questionnaires. The one caveat is that those servers have moderators, as well as admins, going over those answers. I think Lemmy needs to add an ‘Instance Moderator’ role that’s able to deal with things like this without having backend access.
These accounts are being manually registered. Their goal isn't mass registration to spam multiple places, but a few targeted registrations that then spam other instances and get us defederated. They are quite happy to answer questions and do whatever needed to slip through the cracks.
Even manual account approval won't stop them.
What should be limiting their impact is the rate limit set in the Lemmy control panel, but it's not working.
You can have your qualms with the LW or Hexbear admins, but don't be silly. The respective server managers have better things to contend to than to spam or troll on other instances.
Yeah these former reddit mods totally have better things to do... Man lemmy world mod antik is literally stalking me and gets schizophrenia because of it...
Literally just came from a thread about a Newsweek article where some blahaj account carpet bombed everything with porn spam. It’s time to defederate. This is getting ridiculous. If the Admins over there can’t get it under control then we simply shouldn’t deal with it.
It's not a matter of getting it "under control". The trolls specifically create accounts with us to get us defederated, including verifying email and answering approval questions.
The thing that is meant to stop them (rate limiting) doesn't work.
In short there is nothing we can do to get it under control short of blocking them when they slip through the cracks.
If that's not good enough and you still want to defederate, well, that was their goal...