The spammers are taking advantage of open fediverse instances - and it's not one, but instances chosen at random. You may think that banning instances would solve it, but it will block other legit users.
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
97 points (90.8% liked)
Open Source
30789 readers
949 users here now
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Some of the automod bots are also filtering and blocking posts based on the content as well (RegEx, confidence rating based on the age of the account and upvote/downvote ratio, presence of rarely seen domains in URLs), so that helps a bit.
Most of these are unfortunately limited to local instance moderation, which means all instances that don't run these bots don't benefit from them.
The posts have already been modified in ways that they aren't as easy to reliably filter anymore, though still possible with fairly low false positive rate.
To add to this, depending on how content is removed, removal may or may not federate properly. on Lemmy.World, we've been removing content in a way that reliably federates, so while a lot of this spam does arrive in [email protected] and [email protected], the removals on Lemmy.World should federate to all other instances (0.18.5+).
The other portion of the spam is mostly on Lemmy.ml, in [email protected] and [email protected], and not all of their removals have been done in a way that federates.
Lemmy cannot solve the spam issue sadly, this not something the devlopers who built it think about.
Even if mods blocked every instance that has spam, as more instances become avaliable, it would be easy to spam or troll lemmy.
It's weird.. I haven't seen a single spam post here. Only posts about the spam posts. I don't think I have any filtering on my end. Not that I'm complaining, but why don't I see them?
Because your instance admins bulk deleted the posts directly in the database, which doesn't federate to other instances.
Quick and dirty fix because Lemmy is currently ill equipped to delete mass spam originating from many different accounts, but it means people from other instances still see all the spam and the lemmy.ml based moderators can't do much because it's already gone on their side.
There's a few open issues on lemmy for this (federating deletes when banning non-local users), when I get some time I'll work on them.
The spam I noticed was yesterday, might have been removed by the time you came online, since they where identical and likely easy for your admins to filter out.
Would be a good time to open a request on /c/[email protected] for those who are willing to step up.
EDIT: even better would be /c/[email protected]
Done
You did it? It will be good to discuss situations like that, since some moderators seem to abandon the boat. :(
Yes, I did. Looking forward to deleting the spam and making it worthwile for everyone again. :)
Well, that's to be expected imo. People have lives and not everyone will stay. Open Source has big implications for the future so I step up.
thanks!
thanks for pointing this out.
Looks like some group or individual is spamming fediverse seeing a lot of complaints on mastodon too
here's also some more context and explanation about what's going on:
https://fedi.fyralabs.com/notes/9psdqurvye
https://fedi.fyralabs.com/notes/9psnooe6p1
https://fedi.fyralabs.com/notes/9pth6oh3xr
I'm happy to help moderate. I currently mod several small communities here on lemmy including [email protected] and [email protected] and would gladly add this one. I also have experience modding some reddit subs.
To be honest, I'd hate to see the same thing happen here as Reddit.
On Reddit, the problem is there are a small number of people who are modding a huge number of communities
And not sure if that's a good thing
That's not a problem specific to reddit. It happens because only a small portion of people step up to moderate. You'll see the same dynamic play out in all leadership roles whether you're talking about reddit, your local government, volunteer organizations, open source projects, etc.
You can be part of the solution if you step up to be a mod.
Some of those Mods on reddits Moderate dozens of subs though.
I think if they simply ask for mods though, they'd get some.. I'd be happy to mod, but, there might be better candidates
Not sure if that's a good thing.
It's not. Power hungry individuals only want more power, not the responsibility the signed up for.
I’m happy to help moderate.
thanks!
😎
Way to kill a community if you can't keep it clean appoint someone who will .
