Hello everyone. In the interest of transparency, I want to fill you in on some recent admin activity here at sh.itjust.works.
The post shown in the attached image may look familiar. A large number of Misskey and Mastodon accounts started spamming similar posts yesterday. Some have spilled over into Lemmy because the posts mention specific communities by name. The spam wave is ongoing at the time that I am making this post.
sh.itjust.works has temporarily defederated from 34 Misskey and Mastodon instances to slow the flow of posts. However, the accounts are spread across so many instances that a block list can’t stop everything. Fortunately, our automod bot is doing a good job of catching additional posts as they appear. We should be able to refederate with the Misskey and Mastodon instances once the spam wave passes.
If you see a post that slipped by our automod, please report it so we can remove it.
If you are curious about the extent that this spam wave is affecting Lemmy, look at the modlog for the lemmy.world AutoMod bot. That instance is relying more on their automod to mitigate this spam wave than we are, and you can clearly see how much work their bot has been doing. As I type this post it has banned+removed well over 200 Misskey and Mastodon spam accounts in the past day.
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=ModBan&modId=2349429
I want to end with a shout out to all the users who identified and reported these posts, and all the proactive admins on other Lemmy instances who were quick to jump on this problem. Thank you, everyone, for making Lemmy better for the whole community!
That is all for now. Have a great day!
Relatedly, the linked GitHub has explicitly stated that they have nothing to do with any of this. Any further information from them would be on their (Japanese) mastodon server.