One problem with reporting private messages on Lermy is, as an admin i don't see who sent the message. I only see who reported it. And i don't have any actlon available, other than marking the report as handled.
with reported posts, i can ban the poster. With reported messages i'd have to ask the reporter who it was, trust their answer, search for the account manually and then i could ban. Not really efficient or fast if there ever was a spam wave.
of course sparmers could then just register a new account on a open instance and i might need to defederates which would lead to a fractured landscape of spammy open instances and likely inactive private instances.
there's also not even rudimantary spam filtering in lemmy.
The main saving grace is that Lemmy is too small to attract a ton of spam yet.
maybe some of the above is just due my pick of clients (jerboa and the web interface), and there's better tools? If so, i'd love to hear. But as things stand right now, there's a lot to be desired
I would say it is specifically a problem with crypto, i addition to what you said.
you wouldn't be able to do the above with a bank. They'd just make the transaction not to have happened.
with crypto, e.g. btc, you'd have to convince 2-3 of the big mining pools to undo the transction, so random private actors. and it undo all other transactions done as well.
maybe that it happens is not due to crypto. That it cant be remedied is certainly because crypto.