this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
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I'm an instance admin and see heaps of the same stuff being posted. Pretty sure it's one lonely troll not lots of people. Even in this thread, it's all one user account not lots of different people, but we see the same stuff posted across lots of brand new accounts in a very similar way.
Makes sense. Even then a lot of the troll's comments are upvoted by a few people. There are definitely a few people here who share the troll's extreme opinions. Thanks for doing your part in removing all these bullshit. I wish lemmy had a way to block account creation by IP addresses. That might stop trolls from making dozens of alt accounts.
We very often see the same username created across many instances, it's very easy to do and Lemmy has no protections against it. Plus, there are no protections against creating multiple accounts to upvote your own posts (don't get any ideas 😆). IP blocks wouldn't work as instances are entirely independent, so there is no sharing of IP info across different instances.
Currently there is at least some level of coordination across instances, though, such as Lemmy.world's Defense HQ, where instance admins can share info about spammers/trolls so we don't have to wait for a report from one of our own users. There's also Fediseer, but this protects against spam instances not spam accounts on mainstream instances.
Guilty as charged. I'll say though, there are several legitimate reasons why one might want to do this. I personally use it as a substitute for Reddit's multireddit feature, by grouping community subscriptions across different instances by theme. As long as users use the same username across instances I don't think this practice should be automatically regarded as an attempt to sockpuppet. It that was the goal, the accounts would definitely not be using the same username across all the instances.
I didn't intend to imply that by using the same username across instances you were breaking some sort of rule. Different instances have different moderation policies, different federation policies, and different intents. Having multiple accounts in good faith should not be an issue and was not what I was trying to imply.
Rather, the intention was to show that we know bad actors do this with nefarious intent. Here's an example (they show zero comments as they have been banned with content removed - also I think these ones only had posts not comments anyway):
These are racist people that want to stereotype and put down India merely for having top 2 IT industry workers in the world, and getting the job vacancies they feel entitled to. These assholes will tell you how India is responsible for 95% of all IT scam calls, but will never tell you how its never India but almost always Western countries (easily above 85% of global) developing ransomware and locking up people's data for $300-500 per victim.