EDIT: Just crossed 26000!
Almost! At the time of this post, lemmy.world has a whopping 25733 users and is growing fast.
Since my last post yesterday, it has added 4000 new users, making it the clear second-largest lemmy instance out there. Also quickly catching up to lemmy.ml's 36000 (not taking new signups).
beehaw.org (3rd largest) sits at 12500 users, partly because of more restrictive registration requirements.
Source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
Exciting to see all this growth!
Probably the integration of modding tools like AutoMod would be heaps handy here, it could automatically flag potentially troublesome posts and help cut back on spam / bad actors.
From memory Reddit uses automod and so does twitch / discord. Though I'm not sure if they actively let you integrate with it directly on third party sites
There is an advantage that Lemmy's backend is entirely an API with a detached frontend. There are already API wrappers for Rust and Typescript that are officially supported, so I'm sure it's only a matter of time before someone writes a robust automod that can be implemented for communities that desire one.
I have a bit of interest in doing it, but I know nothing about the API itself, so I'm not sure how easy it would be to grab every new thing submitted to a community or instance for moderation.
Yeah I'm also interested in seeing how all of these sites work and looking at ways I can help improve it. The whole positing process / propagation process seems pretty complex though so I'll probably let the more familiar devs work on it for now.
From what I understand though, each admin (for example kbin.social) is maintaining a fork of their project so they could implement automod on their own local content, but that wouldn't stop propagated content (e.g from Lemmy) coming in that's spam.
Seems like the issue might need to be fixed on a site by site basis.
I think I would be helpful for instances to have more control over federation than turning on or of for there instances. Ideally I think giving lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works read only access to Beehaw would have been the best option while we wait for better moderation tools. Until those options exist though they didn't really have much other choice.