this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.

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This morning I was forced to ban about 18 users for being obvious spambots. That deleted their content on my instance. Are they now banned on other instances, too? I'm just trying to figure out what the best process is for eliminating these spambots for good before they flood all of our feeds.

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[–] DrJenkem@lemmy.blugatch.tube 2 points 2 years ago (11 children)

Not seeing a report on the second test post yet.

[–] RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninja 2 points 2 years ago (10 children)

It's definitely there. I guess this proves that some propagation is slow. This is what we see on our reports list right now:

[–] DrJenkem@lemmy.blugatch.tube 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (9 children)

Still not seeing it.

My guess is that actually the report doesn't get federated back out. I think reports are only federated to the instance that hosts the content and the instance the reporter belongs to. So in this case, lemmy.ninja is both the instance that hosts the content and the instance to which you belong to.

In the opposite direction, when I reported the first post, it went to my instance since I am the reporter. And to your instance, since your instance hosts the content.

Assuming I am correct, this could end up being a bit of a problem. That means, users on my instance could go about spamming the fediverse, and I would never see reports of their activity unless they are spamming communities on my instance. The only way I have to know that they're being bad users is if I notice we get defederated, if an admin of another instance specifically reaches out to me, if another user on my instance reports them, or if I manually monitor my users.

At a minimum, I would like to be able to click on a user's name, and be able to report them to their home instance.

But ideally, I would like to get copies of reports made on my users, regardless of where the content resides or who reported it, so I could swiftly take action on them if they're being bad users.

[–] RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninja 1 points 2 years ago

Assuming I am correct, this could end up being a bit of a problem. That means, users on my instance could go about spamming the fediverse, and I would never see reports of their activity unless they are spamming communities on my instance. The only way I have to know that they’re being bad users is if I notice we get defederated, if an admin of another instance specifically reaches out to me, if another user on my instance reports them, or if I manually monitor my users.

This is actually consistent with something that happened to us in the early days of lemmy.ninja. We had a few thousand bot accounts get created on our site. Some other sites defederated from us, but it took us weeks to notice that this happened. One of them happened to be a Mastodon instance, and that person indicated a ban reason that indicated that a user was an edgelord. Well, this was back in the beginning of our site, so we knew all of our users personally. If we had not been really on top of things and really plugged in to what was happening across a lot of the Lemmy instances, we would never have known that the bot users interacted with anyone. We still don't know how many posts or comments they made before we deleted them all.

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