I am asking because I don't want to participate in a spam farm.

I noticed this with 2 accounts:

• Townflex, @stermy4u@lemmy.world ;
• The CyberSec Guru, @UnLocoPoco@lemmy.world .

Why is no one acting pro-actively, to prevent the platform from turning bad? Why did no mod or admin notice this?

lol.

The fediverse is, by intention, not controlled by any particular person or entity. It is not a "platform". So the answer is never.

If there's content you don't like, your best bet is to find an instance with similar ideals.

and do what? only allow links to sanctioned websites?

before the web turned into the same 5 websites, it was perfectly normal to link to your own stuff. That's basically why the web grew into what it became.

As long as people aren't scamming and spamming, let them

1. They don't disclose it clearly;
2. We are way past old web;
3. The websites content in a lot of cases is sloppy, written specifically to get viral on social media, with no journalistic value.

But it's actually moderated by admins, mods and to some extent the software developers of the Fediverse, if they wanted to.

There are many different communities and servers with many different mods and admins, and they all have independent thoughts on what should and shouldn't be allowed.

Developers don't control content.

It varies by instance. PieFed has "spam detection" (not really) which is just a list of the posts and comments that have been downvoted a lot in the last 3 days so it's easy for admins to spot unreported badness and take action. I don't know how often other admins do but I check that report multiple times per day.

For example I nuked unlogopoco from piefed.social a month ago

Looking at the modlog for stermy, I'm seeing a fair bit of moderation action being taken on them and very few posts since then:

On piefed.social I banned townflex.com entirely weeks ago, which must be why I'm not seeing their latest spams.

Basically Lemmy has really poor tools for this which makes mods and admins do a lot more work then necessary, causing them to burn out. If they used PieFed they'd have a much better time.

Developers don't control content.

As I said, the developers can implement moderation software solution.

Easiest example would be if they wanted to mark sus spam accounts, they could mark accounts that posted more than 20 link posts with >40% from the same site as spam accounts, with clear mark for every user to see.

The implementation might need time and resources, but it's possible.

Sounds like a mod / admin issue. Users can downvote and report. Mods and admins can ban. If I were a mod, I'd make a rule for it ban those two and blacklist the sites. I looked at them and they do indeed look like autogenerated slop. As a user I'm gonna start downvoting and likely reporting.

The appropriate first action is to raise awareness, kinda like this post, except without the guilt tripping.

E: It looks like stermy4u is already banned.

I really appreciate your efforts in developing Piefed.

I didn't see the moderation actions you refranced, I just noticed them posting everywhere. That's why I wrote my post.

Thank you for explaining it.

You must not be aware of the very recent Tesseract drama.

Edit: better link, take 2.

No problem!

BTW in PieFed you can report a user account, not just individual posts. So if you go to https://piefed.world/u/stermy4u@lemmy.world then click on More -> Report that'll ping the piefed.world admins about it. It looks like in this case they've been responding to individual posts by removing them and not seeing the bigger picture but they will see it once they look at the user profile.

Preach! And a stern look at the Tesseract dev.

You control that. You block them. I dont think its actually against the rules. I dont like it either.

Vote it down and move on? Help fund the development of a client that can deal with these things for you? Run your own instance where you can set your own blockloats?

You have agency. If something bothers you, take initiative instead of putting the responsibility.on others.

Ooh I made the list!

This happens all the time. They fly under the radar for a moment until someone notices them. Then their accounts get banned.

Stermy4u was banned for promoting their AI plagiarism site.

Have you reported the other user? It's way less likely anyone will notice if they're not reported. If you report a post make sure to say that the user is a spammer so mods/admins will look at account activity.

A lot of the time this is just AI-generated trash, not an actual person linking to their stuff. They are both scammers and spammers.

Townflex is AI plagiarism repackaging trending stories to siphon clicks.

I haven't deep dived into the cybersecguru but there isn't a single named human being associated with that site. One "person" claims to have written maybe 15000 words of journalism in the last 24 hours and doesn't want credit. This is from their About page:

My name is The CyberSec Guru, and I’m the founder of The CyberSec Guru. I’ve been fascinated by technology and online security since my High School days.

Again, I haven't spent a lot of time looking, but this is probably AI slop.

Hey, I promote my dinkum commercial enterprises on here all the time! Nobody's shot me for it.

...Yet.

The fediverse doesn't like that kind of approach from devs. Both Piefed and Tesseract got criticized heavily over doing stuff like that.

How exactly do you imagine moderating an instance works?
As admins and mods, we don't sit in front of the user list all day watching what every user is up to. 80% of the time, we rely on accounts like that being reported.

A lot of mods have their own agenda. Not much different from all the politicians or really anyone who has been granted a position of negligible power. It's a human thing. Finding the forthright and true mods is the goal.