This morning I was forced to ban about 18 users for being obvious spambots. That deleted their content on my instance. Are they now banned on other instances, too? I’m just trying to figure out what the best process is for eliminating these spambots for good before they flood all of our feeds.
Not seeing a report on the second test post yet.
It’s definitely there. I guess this proves that some propagation is slow. This is what we see on our reports list right now:
Still not seeing it.
My guess is that actually the report doesn’t get federated back out. I think reports are only federated to the instance that hosts the content and the instance the reporter belongs to. So in this case, lemmy.ninja is both the instance that hosts the content and the instance to which you belong to.
In the opposite direction, when I reported the first post, it went to my instance since I am the reporter. And to your instance, since your instance hosts the content.
Assuming I am correct, this could end up being a bit of a problem. That means, users on my instance could go about spamming the fediverse, and I would never see reports of their activity unless they are spamming communities on my instance. The only way I have to know that they’re being bad users is if I notice we get defederated, if an admin of another instance specifically reaches out to me, if another user on my instance reports them, or if I manually monitor my users.
At a minimum, I would like to be able to click on a user’s name, and be able to report them to their home instance.
But ideally, I would like to get copies of reports made on my users, regardless of where the content resides or who reported it, so I could swiftly take action on them if they’re being bad users.
I think you are right on all counts. I have just resolved both reports that we had on our side. That clears the report list, so I don’t expect you to see any changes on your side, but I thought I’d mention it just in case.
Glad we got to the bottom of this! And yeah, just to confirm, I see no changes on my side.
However, I’m surprised to still see my posts there. I would have thought you deleting them on your instance would propagate out to my instance.
Well, I purged them from the database. Maybe if I had removed the post instead of purging, that would have propagated. Right now the posts don’t exist in our database at all.
But I bet the more likely scenario is that once a post gets propagated, it persists forever on the instance it gets propagated to unless someone purges it there.
Ahh, I’m actually guessing it’s because you purged it. I think purges are local, but deleting it is considered a moderation action and is therefore propagated out. I just checked the modlog and clicked on a random post that was removed on a different instance. When I went to the post, I could still see it, but there was a notification at the top that said “Removed by Moderator”.
Excellent! This is good to know! I bet other users who aren’t admins/mods can’t see the post at all when it’s removed. I’ll avoid purging from now on.
Yup, I’m pretty sure that’s how this works. I opened the post in an incognito window, but still on my instance, and got an error message instead of the post.
This is actually consistent with something that happened to us in the early days of lemmy.ninja. We had a few thousand bot accounts get created on our site. Some other sites defederated from us, but it took us weeks to notice that this happened. One of them happened to be a Mastodon instance, and that person indicated a ban reason that indicated that a user was an edgelord. Well, this was back in the beginning of our site, so we knew all of our users personally. If we had not been really on top of things and really plugged in to what was happening across a lot of the Lemmy instances, we would never have known that the bot users interacted with anyone. We still don’t know how many posts or comments they made before we deleted them all.
Makes sense, you can open an issue for this if there isnt already.
Will do. By the way, thanks for all the hard work you’ve put into Lemmy comrade!