This one is both upsetting and weird.
So there was a user on ponder.cat whoās been spamming posts. Like a lot. 58 per day, on average. Not 58 comments. 58 posts.
I started seeing a little scattering of reports about it, mostly just figured it was the modsā business to deal with, and then finally today I actually really took a look at what they were doing and realized it was way over the top. Pretty much everyone in the comments agreed when someone brought it up.
A 25 day old account with 1,400+ posts? What the actual fuck? My entire goddamn feed is this one accountā¦
Touch grass. Good lord. Youāre carpet bombing multiple communities with repeats of the same crap.
The user was not receptive.
lol.
I guess people here do not know how to block an account.
:)
Is that a compliment or a rant?
May I introduce you to Lemmy block function.
If you donāt like my posts then block me and you will never see them again. As simple as that.
Thatās a bunch of bullshit. The voting was about as you would expect. I said to the user:
Thatās not how it works. If youāre interfering with the average Lemmy userās experience, you donāt get to claim it doesnāt count because each individual person would be able to block each individual problematic account, if they wanted to have a good experience. Honestly, these people have a point. You have been posting an average of 58 posts per day. Thatās too much. I post a ton, and thatās about 10 times more than me, and Iāve gotten multiple complaints about posting too much in particular communities. The handful of times itās happened, my reaction was āOh my bad what sounds like an acceptable levelā and then to more or less stick to an acceptable level. Getting snarky with people who are asking you to cool it is very bad. Please stop posting so much. Anything about 10-15 posts per day starts to feel really excessive to me. Definitely donāt be dismissive about peopleās complaints to you about it.
They rejected my suggestion, so I sent them a DM that was a little more direct about it: Stop doing this if you want to keep your account on my instance.
Then, for some reason, they deleted their account on their own.
Well, that was weird, but at least itās all resolved and we can all get back to what we were doing. Or waitā¦ whatās happening now?
I wasnāt expecting āmaking sure we make a safe space for the spammers by banning people who complain about spamā to be an important moderation duty, but I guess in the bizarro world that is !news@lemmy.world moderation philosophy, it makes perfect sense.
https://lemmy.world/modlog/1347
@Ghyste@sh.itjust.works
Canāt answer that, but itās possible theyāre simply not aware of their alt history. Thereās a similarly active user, Microwave, but theyāre legit; they always post quality stuff with no agenda. Perhaps theyāre giving āCatā the benefit of doubt? They also give several other controversial posters a lot of leeway (wonāt mention them, but you probably already know the handful Iām referring to). Not suggesting any kind of agenda with the LW mods; just seems like theyāre trying a bit too hard to be āfair and balancedā.
This user nukes their accounts, so unless one is familiar with the patterns of their previous accounts, itās difficult to correlate them with no history available. If theyāre on your instance and you have concerns about them (and they havenāt self-destructed yet), you might be ahead to just ban them ahead of time (w/o content removal) so thereās record for later comparison.
That part, not realizing the person is a problem, I get. Iām talking about banning the users arguing with them and deleting the requests for them to stop spamming, and leaving in place the spam and the cockeyed defenses of their spam.
A super-charitable reading could maybe say that this is an instance of lemmy.world mods believing that their role is ādictating to the community whatās right and wrongā instead of āgetting a read of the communityās judgement of right and wrong, and implementing it.ā And then, on top of that wrong interpretation of even why theyāre in the role in the first place, they didnāt bother to take even a glance at the claims that were made about this user, just āherp derp it is 100% impossible that they might be spamming, therefore theyāre not spamming, therefore this user complaining about spam is trying to break the Fediverse. Ban them! I fixed it now, I made things better.ā But that just sounds like an insane conclusion for anyone whoās genuinely trying to help, ever to come to. Maybe I should be more generous to the volunteers but it just sounds really bizarre.
Sorry for barging in. As an admin I also have to do with some crap but I need to be the voice of paranoia here.
We dont think the big platforms and state actors care about us but this has just the right amount of organization to sound like a campaign.
If youāre not in the matrix lemmy admin channel i suggest joining. Sorry if that is redundand since I have not looked for you there. A ton of admins are there.
Good luck anyway.
Oh, they care.
It isnāt safe to say much of anything about it, but lemmy is definitely on the radar, and has been for at least a few months.
What states, what organizations within them, I aināt saying shit, but it isnāt just one vector.
This is the craziest paragraph Iāve read in a long while. Iām trying to interpret it, but I canāt quite get it. I know you want to stay secret, but how fucked are we?
Fucked?
Most users are fine. Hell, even the devs are fine. It isnāt at the point where lemmy is a threat to anyone, so itās a combination of observation and manipulation rather than a hammer coming down.
Whatās certain is that nobody should use lemmy for planning anything at all. Thereās a degree of necessity in using it and other social media for some things, but trust nobody enough to take risks.
Yeah, I donāt think you are paranoid. Itās notably weird to me.
I may poke my head into the admin chat and see what I see.
You hit it on the head. We werenāt aware of this user, as we had 0 reports about them until today.
Open up your report queue, switch to all, search for āmandates created in the last presidencyā.