EDIT: The developer has replied in this thread, see below :)

We banned a spammer from this instance recently, and I went to see what instance it was coming from (in case there was more)

https://coves.social/community-guidelines

Coves is built on the AT Protocol, which means it's part of a larger decentralized network. Your account and identity exist on your Personal Data Server (PDS), not on our servers. These guidelines and our moderation only apply to the official Coves AppView at coves.social. Other instances of Coves or other AT Protocol services have their own policies and moderation. If you're banned or have content removed from our AppView, your AT Protocol identity and data on your PDS are unaffected — you can still use other services on the network.

They do credit Photon and they have released the source code for their modified frontend: https://coves.social/legal

I also found this on their GitHub: https://github.com/BrettM86/tidepool

Tidepool is a read-only ActivityPub → atproto bridge for the threadiverse. It follows Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin communities (FEP-1b12 group federation), materializes their posts, comments, and profiles as social.coves.* records in a virtual PDS it operates itself, and serves them over com.atproto.sync.* so the Coves AppView indexes fediverse communities exactly as it indexes native ones. Votes stay bridge-side as aggregates behind one sanctioned XRPC.

EDIT: The developer has confirmed that two-way federation is planned

I think it's neat that someone is working on this, but I'm a bit concerned that it's read only from the threadiverse:

• They would suffer from a problem similar to what we have, when someone sets up a Reddit repost bot. Users interacting with some content while not knowing that their replies aren't reaching the original poster
• they get content without giving content back

edit: nvm

I'm the dev here if anyone has any questions, I was waiting till it was in a more finalized state to announce it. Also full transparency since this community is a little more sensitive on it, this project has been agentically built over the course of the last 1-2 years, but I am a SWE in my day job.

I'm sure most people here would be more curious about the ActivityPub -> atproto bridge, I call this Tidepool code is here:
https://tangled.org/bretton.dev/tidepool

I'm planning full Lemmy / Piefed / Pylova federation, the goal is not only to be read only here! Ex my comment is from Coves! Communities themselves aren't being federated yet though.

OP I'd love to know what was spamming you, I can help tackle that we don't have many users and signups are disabled, but I do have some automated bot posts running but those shouldn't be federating yet.

UPDATE - Spammer banned on my side 🫡

good to hear that you're planning two-way federation

Hey 👋, I'm the dev! The goal is not to be read only! In fact our comments are already federating (this one).

The community federation just needs a bit more work across both the bridge and wrapping up some configuration work, but frankly our user count is <10 right now. There's not really much native activity, it's mostly some bot accounts I have set up, so you're not missing much atm

it brought back bad memories of an old site that was actually stealing our content without any attribution and they never added two-way federation lol

but yea this sounds good, I wish you luck!

Or the one that's currently doing that (Threads)

A strange amount of sites have been popping up lately using photon

That's great to hear! Sorry if the post caused any potential stress, I've edited the end of the post and I'm open to editing it further to not give anyone the wrong impression.

Looking forward to seeing this in action :)

The spammer was this user, it looked like one of those impersonation accounts that pop up on Mastodon instances from time to time. You might have already banned the user by the time we got to it: @elonspacex49.bsky.social@coves.social

That's because you're the goat and photon is awesome

Same feeling here ha ha