Both !infosec@kbin.social and !science@kbin.social are being spammed constantly with opioid ads and other non-sense.

It’s quite annoying if you want to use the all-feed. I’ve blocked at least 6 spam accounts just today.

Just wanted to bring that to your attention. Thanks.

  • As someone on kbin.social, I’m not seeing it. I saw a comment in a similar thread saying that moderation done on Kbin doesn’t federate to Lemmy instances, and I think that’s the culprit here. @ernest (the Kbin dev) is working towards a full release, and I hope that it might fix this issue—or at the very least, that it’s dealt with shortly after.

    EDIT: Yeah, I looked at @science from lemmy.ml, and my God is it awful. This really needs to get fixed ASAP.

    • ernest ( ernest@kbin.social ) 
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      3 years ago

      This week, I’ve been dealing with cleaning up instances from spam. Several hundred accounts were removed, along with several thousand posts - these were massive operations. It’s possible that due to the volume of requests, other federated instances hit rate limits. I see that some of them are still in the queue with a “fail” status. I will gradually resend them after some time. Along with the update of kbin.social and the first release of kbin, new modeartion options will be available, including spam blocking (such as global blocking domains), a new reporting panel for moderators, and improved federation between instances. I will also address abandoned instances and ensure that each one has at least a few active moderators. I know how urgent this issue is, and it’s my top priority. I just need a bit more time as Piotr and I are preparing for the update.

      • e569668 ( e569668@fedia.io ) 
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        3 years ago

        It looks like all the spam I’ve seen are from newly registered accounts. Perhaps this is something you’ve already considered, but would shutting off registration on kbin.social and pointing people to other instances until things are more manageable help?

        • PenguinCoder ( Penguincoder@beehaw.org ) 
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          3 years ago

          I understand this is a frustrating experience dealing with so much crud in your feed. Admins and mods for many instances of Lemmy and Kbin are trying to work with the tools available to stem this. Attack the problem, not the person. Bee nice.

          Please don’t lash out at those trying to help you and the community. We certainly do appreciate your reports as well, hopefully we’ll find a solution that won’t require so much of your report efforts.

        • ernest ( ernest@kbin.social ) 
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          3 years ago

          Of course, I’m taking action, and on kbin.social, those posts have been removed, which you can verify. However, for some reason, it doesn’t always federate with Lemmy. It used to work before, but practically after every Lemmy update, there’s something to fix in the code, or it could be related to API limits because some requests receive a “fail” status in the queues. The same applies to spam from Lemmy instances - I had to manually clean up hundreds of posts from other instances because they didn’t always send AP requests, which I verified in the logs.

          Do you seriously believe that it’s a matter of individual accounts, and banning a user solves the problem?

    • There’s a bug going on that prevents Kbin moderation from replicating over the fediverse - what happens is they will nuke the threads but it will not reflect across the rest of the federation which is a huge bug. A lot of instances are either blocking their communities en masse to avoid defederating, or just flat out defederating.

        • Yeah the more I learn about the tech and design around these systems the more I question the philosophy and logic of the whole setup.

          The massive vulnerabilities from cached and redistributed (federated) CSAM content, the inability to operate at scale due to various attacks from malicious actors, the lack of moderation tools to deal with the aforementioned issues. It’s just a pile of problems that other systems have literally already solved.

          We should go back to forums. This format is overrated, we’re only clinging to it because we’ve been addicted to reddit for a decade and we can’t fathom going back to something as regressive as forums, even if they are logically the better solution for a majority of instances.