I recently wrote a command-line utility lemmyverse to find communities indexed by Lemmy Explorer. A quick count shows almost 14%(!) of all communities indexed by lemmyverse are junk communities created by a single user @LMAO (reported here):
% lemmyverse . | wc -l
30376
% lemmyverse enoweiooe | wc -l
4206
Here’s a python script, using no external dependencies, which uses Lemmy’s HTTP API to delete all communities that @LMAO moderates:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import json
import urllib.parse
import urllib.request
baseurl = "https://lemmy.world"
username = "admin"
password = "password"
def login(user, passwd):
url = baseurl+"/api/v3/user/login"
body = urllib.parse.urlencode({
"username_or_email": user,
"password": passwd,
})
resp = urllib.request.urlopen(url, body.encode())
j = json.load(resp)
return j["jwt"]
def get_user(name):
query = urllib.parse.urlencode({"username": name})
resp = urllib.request.urlopen(baseurl+"/api/v3/user?"+query)
return json.load(resp)
def delete_community(token, id):
url = baseurl+"/api/v3/community/delete"
params = {
"auth": token,
"community_id": id,
}
body = urllib.parse.urlencode(params)
urllib.request.urlopen(url, body.encode())
token = login(username, password)
user = get_user("LMAO")
for community in user["moderates"]:
id = community["community"]["id"]
try:
delete_community(token, id)
except Exception as err:
print("delete community id %d: %s" % (id, err))
Change username
and password
on lines 8 and 9 to suit.
Hope that helps! :) Thanks for the work you all put in to running this popular instance.
Gotta say, I’m loving the transparency in the fediverse
I’ve managed to create an entire career (almost 10 years in now) out of the transparency in the tech community. Especially in open source. I’m hoping that paying it back like this inspires and provides the same opportunity to others!
Stuff like this makes me really happy.
Sometimes, people call me naïve or overly optimistic for being hopeful for change, but I’m not expecting us to be able to fix all the problems; I’m excited because we’re taking steps towards transmuting our current set of problems into a different set that will put us closer to a hypothetical ideal world. I can’t imagine what this ideal world would look like, but I don’t need to as long as I maintain a sense of “towards” and be clear on what values are worth striving towards.
It’s helpful for my morale to remember that we’re not building an ideal world from scratch, we’re iterating upon what already exists. This means that people like you exist, and the domain knowledge you possess is far from a new thing, but will continue to grow and adapt as the rest of the world changes around it. There’s a lot of smart and wise people working on making things better :)
(And I include myself in the “smart” category at least, it’s just that protein structure isn’t too relevant to social media (well… aside from the game Fold-it… or the fact that Meta and Google research is very relevant to BioInformatics ¯\(ツ)/¯ )
This comment really spoke to me; thanks for replying.
we’re iterating upon what already exists
Absolutely. Do I think Lemmy, Python, ActivityPub or any of this web stuff is ideal? Personally: no. But that ability to make a little gesture like this, maybe have it accepted (or not!), and make it all a bit easier to work is worth any sort of personal compromise and frustration I feel. That optimism that you mention is really powerful.
You mean two days ago? Or were there more attacks?
Is it a coincidence or is that the same person that was attacking lemmy a few weeks back for revenge on getting booted?
Edit: yup it is.
Mental illness is a helluva thing
I wonder how long it took to create those communities. one dude wasted so much time just to have all their work wiped out by a script.
I wonder how long it took to create those communities.
… about as long as it took LMAO to write a script to do it, at a guess.
Depending on how easy the API is to use, that might be done in a couple of minutes
This is great work. I assume LMAO was the same guy as Angled - it’ll be an 1.7K communities nixed if the script is used for him (so, 19% of the total!)
Yup, that’s the guy, says so in the profile bio.
So we’re going to need a captcha on community creation now? It’s not the worst idea.
Some per-session rate-limiting by a HTTP reverse proxy could go a long way. Should any user be able to create a community via the API more than, say, once every 10 seconds? I’m not familiar with the rate limiting already built in to the Lemmy server, though.
Now that’s some beautiful python code. Good work.
Great news, thanks for the help!
Should probably put in a check for if the community has any content or not tbh. Low chance, but still an edge case.
Why does this douche cannon deserve to have a community?
The ownership could be changed rather than deleting it entirely in this case.
You should let him get to like 20k communities then run this.