Hello everyone,
Recently we have been dealing with a lot of spam from the kbin.social communities. There is a bug in kbin where moderation tasks are not federated to other instances. That means even if a moderator over at kbin removes a post, it will still be visible on Lemmy instances and it’s up to the instance admins to clean it up.
There have been talks about this in the Lemmy admin channels with some instances considering defederating from kbin.social - and others who have already made that step.
We don’t want to defederate, because we know this would impact the kbin community greatly - but we have to do something. That’s why we have currently removed most of the kbin communities from Lemmy World, making them unavailable to our users. But the kbin users can still view and interact with our communities and users.
This means that those spam-accounts will stil be able to post in our communities too, but at least it makes the task of moderation already a little bit lighter on our team. But it was either this or defederation. The moderation tools on kbin are in an even worse state then Lemmy’s.
We will keep monitoring the situation and will keep you up to date should anything change.
We hope you understand and support our decision.
The Lemmy World team
Devs learning in real time why social media (especially decentralized) should be designed moderation first in design.
Hi - mod of a small kbin.social mag here - @13thFloor - and a lemmy.world user. Is there anything we can do on our end to help mitigate the problem, or make it easier to flag spam that makes its way to Lemmy? I’d be more than willing to include a note to the lemmy.world admins if a spam post is deleted off of a mag I mod here- just need to know who to contact.
Side notes - Ernest (kbin.social admin) just responded on the spam issue here. The community has been actively working over here to flag and remove spam accounts (I’ve personally flagged close to 100). According to the most recent news from @ernest earlier last week, we’ve got a software update incoming, and a magazine cleanup in the works that will hopefully make an impact.
Heya! Not really. It’s just a few communities that are being spammed really hard, so only those are removed. I think the work you’re doing by flagging these spam accounts is already very helpful to Ernest and his team. He himself was kind enough to join us in this thread and give us some more information. For now all we can do is wait…
Thank you for your patience and understanding :)
Hi - got a note from a user that @13thFloor isn’t federated over there any more as of yesterday. Looks like @scifi, modded by @inkican, was as well. Was there a reason these communities were defederated?
Defederated is only on instance-level. A community can not be defederated, but it can be removed or purged. So far the only action we have taken is removing some of the Kbin communities (or magazines as they are called on kbin).
Your community is still available on https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]
If you want to see which instances we are currently defederated from you can look that up here.
So no, we didn’t block your community. But I do see some posts are not showing up on Lemmy World. Not sure why that happens, there haven’t been any changes on our end. We will update to Lemmy 0.18.5 tomorrow which resolves some federation issues.
Edit: It actually was removed. now restored. Passed info to other admins.
Thanks for the update. I’m still getting the following error across multiple browsers when I hit https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]:
Error!
There was an error on the server. Try refreshing your browser. If that doesn’t work, come back at a later time. If the problem persists, you can seek help in the Lemmy support community or Lemmy Matrix room.Hoping it gets resolved with the update - was worried we’d screwed something up and gotten on your removed list.
Huh. I’m sorry I have to check what happened but the 13thfloor was actually removed. I must have missed the ‘removed’ tag earlier. I restored it and I’ll make sure the other admins know not to remove that community. So it should be ok again.
Thanks much! That fixed it for the 13thFloor. FYI, looks like @scifi is still blocked, and they’re generally pretty cool without spam issues.
Restored that one as well [email protected]
Hopefully this is resolved quickly. We are stronger together.
Spam has consistently been the death of the open internet, even the big tech silos struggle with spam (Instagram for example – despite having incredibly invasive techniques for identifying “genuine” users – is STILL inundated with spam commenters). I think instances on the fediverse should reconsider their open registration policy, either totally close registrations when you reach an agreed upon critical mass of users, or adopt some form of invitation or application system for new users. I believe Mastodon supports both in the software.
I agree. A hard limit would be a good idea, it’d nip a lot of problems in the bud.
I’m as idealist as the next guy, but I was also a hellacious misfit once, so I know what it feels like to be a hate-fueled asshole. I really hope these Fediverse idealists have started to understand that assholes do exist, and they must take measures to defend themselves.
Combat is a part of life. Violence is an aspect of competitive biology. You’re gonna have to deal with attacks here. Forever. Just get the fuck used to it, you’re at war and will be until you die or leave this place. Largely due to politics and the way open communication has not just empowered good people to create good things, but has also empowered extremists and criminals too. And they exist and have goals too, in case any of you people fucking forgot.
Well, shit. I had totally forgotten.
I’m making a note now.
For real though. You’ve summed it up pretty good here.
I saw a punnet of really big grapes today. It was very cool; I’ve never seen grapes that big! Do you reckon they would’ve been like, suuuper juicy?
I also noticed there was a lot of spam from kbin regarding the online sales of pharmacy drugs that require prescriptions.
i mean theres so many kbin communities, which one???
Good transparency. Thank you for your work!
So that’s why the modlogs were going ballistic. Oh, well, I hope things are fixed soon.
There’s been a heap of development going on with kbin recently, with a release upcoming. Overall the development process has been a bit slow with Ernest (the guy who owns the project) having personal issues to resolve.
Definitely the moderation process needs to be improved so that we have better ways of addressing spam so it doesn’t bother other instances.
Personally I’m of the opinion that we should be using a metric based system where we weigh in the users date or creation, overall interactivity, upvote / downvote ratio and other data to potentially flag spam users. But honestly fighting spam is really hard and all of that would have to be built (plus it’s a public repo so bad actors could look for how this is pieced together and find new ways to get past)
Quick reminder that kbin was still fairly early in development when the reddit exodus began and sped things up much sooner than anticipated. A few teething issues are to be expected and Ernest, the dev, has been open and communicating about what’s going on.
War were declared.
And this
ham gumsocial media account is all bonesIs it A.D. 2101 already?
Our people tell the same story
Damn, I main Kbin 🙃
Same here, on desktop it is my go-to. Sync doesn’t support it yet, so can’t use it.
You can technically use Artemis for kbin though at the moment it only supports artemis.camp (another kbin instance) and I don’t know currently how long it is until other kbin instances work as well.
alexandrite.app is pretty great for me for desktop, you can log into any instance from it and the interface is quite awesome.
Manager of Managers (MoM) will be required long-term it sounds like… thanks for the good work all.
That makes sense, to be honest: add a layer of complexity in the software (such as federated instances), add a layer of management.
Yep; ideally, each person should be able to specialize. I hope there are enough well-intentioned and knowledgeable volunteers. Over reliance on free mod labor is part of what ruined Reddit
Thanks for not cutting us off. I sub and post to a lot of lemmy.world communities, some of them small, and wouldn’t want to have to stop contributing or make a new Lemmy account.
I’m worried kbin development is stalling.
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