@bayaz It's you who gave me food for thought, alongside many other moderators! I only found out yesterday how to properly ban spam accs on kbin.social.
I really appreciate all efforts to grow and take care of communities, be it on kbin, on lemmy, or on mbin! Every day, I try to keep learning from other moderators.
Given the sheer lack of moderation tools, many mods do great work. I hope the situation will improve so that moderatoring will become easier.
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.
I thought that donations going to you were going to be pocketed and spent on hard liquor, not for our benefit. I'm disappointed in you ernest, be better.
As I’ve been lurking around the fediverse, running instances seems to be universally a hobby project, and it’s a little concerning. It kind of gives the impression of all being idealistic young kids embarrassed to ascribe value to their own time. I mean, you can do a lot with volunteer labor, especially if it’s a good ecosystem with appropriate recognition and gratitude, but the people are absolutely the most valuable parts of kbin.social, lemmy.world, etc, and they do have to eat, pay rent, go on vacation. It’s tough to respond to a 3am message about your instance being hacked if you have a job to be at four hours later, and leads to a whole different kind of burnout.
It’s early days yet, but I hope the bigger instance teams get some input from people who’ve managed growth spurts in non-profits, and especially the transition to their first paid staff members (even when that staff member is the owner).
@elscallr Well some history. IPv4 (and later IPv6 now) was meant to connect computers together, ideally without any router/modem in between but each device directly on the web (but ipv6 came too late). So we got an interconnected web.
Later Tim Berners-Lee just want to have a human-readable documents to be linked together, with a distributed architecture that would see those documents stored on multiple servers, controlled by different people, and interconnected. I think the fediverse comes pretty close to this idea.
I also think big companies and centralized solutions might make it easier for the user, but we also now know all the downsides of those solutions from Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft,... you are the product.
ipv4, and the structures that came before it, were meant for academics and military commands to talk to each other on government funding. It was the definition of an elitist space and filled with idealistic kids and dilettantes who didn’t need to worry about rent. Nobody in the public would even know it existed for a decade.
I agree ... one of the greatest things I've seen in FOSS has been #HomeAssistant growing to the point that Nabu Casa can employee 25 people to work on the project (I have no idea if they're all full time or what, but I know at least a decent chunk are).
If I spin up an instance, whether it stays afloat is between me and the people on my instance, but if we want the flagship to stay up and for our dev to have the time/willingness to make improvements, he needs to get paid. Even just project managing a project of this size is an immense undertaking and just accepting PR's from others can get to be crazy.
I'd honestly prefer to not have to decide between "I want this to go to /kbin" or "Ernest is 'allowed' to buy a beer with this". I'd prefer to donate to something that ensures /Kbins needs are met for x amount of months and then the rest is split between employees of the org at whatever ratio is agreed upon. That's just my $.02 ... I really do appreciate that Ernest wants to be so careful with the fund though, I just don't want the /Kbin account to be sitting multi-thousands of dollars in the black while Ernest is struggling with basic subsistence.
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.
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