Reporting them at the very least sends a message to the mods of the community the reported post/comment was on. Not sure about how/when it goes to instance admins, though. Which is where they really need to be reported to. Mods can block them from their community, but a spammer (human or bot) generally affects the entire server so it needs to go all the way to the top.
Blocking them also works to at least reduce the bots’ effectiveness. If everyone blocks it, it isn’t doing anything but wasting bandwidth, and if it’s not having the desired effect whoever deployed it might give up.
Most of the communities with significant spam problems have no moderators other than ernest. It's up to him to recruit more people to help moderate those.
In his most recent announcement, he said he's bringing 2 new instance mods. But I couldn't find the actual announcement post for the new team members. Unfortunately, these days Ernest often disappears for days or weeks at a time, so there's really no telling when we'll see the impacts of this.
There wasn’t a lot of good source material to use a couple months ago. I’m unsure if that has changed, but it might’ve. It’s a prerequisite for writing a good wikipedia article, at any rate, as opposed to a shitty one.
You’re not allowed to write your own telling of the story on there, you have to copy other people’s and cite them. So a lot of other people need to have written on it, from a position of being a reliable source, before a quality wikipedia article can be written.
Though a small, mediocre article can be better than no article, if you’re giving someone a good framework to improve on later, as more sources develop.
And also bear in mind that if someone writes a crappy enough kbin article now and it gets deleted, that's going to make it harder to get a kbin article started again in the future. I know that's not how it's supposed to work in principle but unfortunately it's how it works in practice.
Pleroma still doesn't have a wikipedia article because of this, despite being one of the oldest AP-enabled fediverse services. It's been deleted twice because some moderator didn't like the quality or number of sources.
Wikipedia doesn’t like articles that are basically ads. Articles should be written from an unbiased standpoint using independent sources. If an article has been removed because it’s basically self promotion, then mods will be more careful about reopening it again.
i just took a look at what it takes to write a wiki article, and it is extensive (rightfully so). anyone who plans on trying this, please be prepared to have sources prepared, be unbiased, be a good writer, and more.
Not sure where you're seeing them... it's always been in the microblog section, you can also follow individuals on Mastodon. They also come up in searches and hashtags.
Don't be intimidated, interaction works just fine!
I once again ask why there is no form of filtering, especially for new users who rapid post. Also spammers using the same names with a higher number after they get banned.
I registered the next-in-sequence for one of them. Haven't seen that username since. I like to think I broke a script somewhere, but it could just as easily have broken a spammer's tiny little brain. The disappointing but more likely explanation is that they shrugged and moved on to a different set of usernames.
Blocking is a personal thing, there’s no heuristic that determines if a specific user is blocked by x people to automatically block them for users. That would be quite appealing though, but the abuse potential is quite significant, if you have a bot army…
Reporting will notify the moderator(s) of the community, so if and how fast they react really depends on them.
This is easy to ask for, but not easy to implement.
The problem I see (and what influenced the tone of my other comment) is that I don't think I've seen any acknowledgement about any sort of filtering and this is a persistent problem. I get it, but also it seems really unnecessary to manually remove the 10 threads obviously not made by humans (or even just the 3 accounts that just popped up in a close time-frame).
It doesn't need to be perfect, surely any technique can be worked-around eventually but that also introduces extra steps (that spammers don't need to take now) that makes it harder and less likely. Doing so I think makes moderation much more viable and impactful.
Even just some sort of auto-spoiler/warning (multiple suspicious keywords in a non-relevant community, new user, 3 threads in an hour etc) could have an effect.
I mean this is because of a technical issue likely on Kbin's side. Which is not a shock.
Also I posted 2 threads to kbin communities recently, 1 got most of its activity from LW and the other got 4 favorites from different instances and no comments (and it did not federate to LW, though I don't think that was related to the temporary block). LW could be too big but kbin seems kind of dead for the communities that aren't constantly in the feed (likely because of the same people posting, in many cases). Though technical issues always could be part of it in one way or another.
except it doesn’t work well for the rest of lemmy/the fediverse.
many other instances seem to be getting hit by this, but they don’t have as many activities generated locally for this to become much of a problem. additionally, this is mostly affecting instances with high latency to the instance that is being flooded by kbin, as lemmy currently has an issue where activity throughput between instances with high latency can’t keep up with too many activities being sent. the impact of this is can be a bit less on smaller instances with smaller communities often not having as many subscribers on remote instances, although we’ve seen problems reported by some other admins as well. this includes e.g. kbin.earth, which i suspect to have been hit by responses from a lemmy instance, while the lemmy instance was actually only answering the requests sent from that kbin instance.
during the last peak, when we decided to pull the plug for now, kbin.social was sending us more than 20 activities per second for 7 hours straight. lemmy.world can easily handle this amount of activities, but the problem arises when this impacts our federation towards other (lemmy) instances, as e.g. votes will get relayed by the community (magazine) instance, which means, depending on the type of activity being sent, we might have to be sending out the same 20 requests per second to up to 4,000+ other fediverse instances that are subscribed/following the community this is happening in. trying to send 20 requests per second, which lemmy does not do in parallel, requires us to use at most 50ms per activity total sending time to avoid creating lag. when the instance is in australia, with 200ms+ latency, this is simply not possible.
ps: if you’re wondering how i’m seeing this post, you can search for a post url and comment urls on lemmy to make lemmy fetch them, even if they haven’t been directly submitted through normal federation processes. this requires a logged in user on lemmy’s end.
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