(What makes this an unpopular opinion is that I’m basically advocating for jettisoning an entire Fediverse platform rather than just riding out the rough patch.)
I admin a Lemmy instance, and the amount of spam we get from Kbin and have to deal with is absolutely insane. Every morning I have to spend at least 15 minutes cleaning it up: responding to reports, banning accounts, purging posts, and pruning the images. And it’s more of that all through the day, just in smaller bites.
Many times I’ve toyed with the idea of de-federating Kbin instances completely, but I don’t want to cut off interactions with their legit users. The legit users are not the problem and are very much welcome.
Side note: If you’re reading this and thinking “What Kbin spam?”, then you should reach out to your instance admin(s) and give them a big ‘thank you’. The spam from Kbin is not just a “me” problem.
The underlying issue is that Kbin mod actions do not federate to Lemmy. At all. The mods of their magazines can (and probably are) doing a great job cleaning up spam, but once that spam goes out, it’s a one-way trip to Lemmy and completely up to the instance admins to deal with. For comparison, on Lemmy, the community mods can remove the spam which will then issue a removal action on instances that received it via federation.
I’ve tried various ways to unsubscribe and remove Kbin communities on my instance, but the “unsubscribe” doesn’t seem to be honored by Kbin, either. So I’m stuck receiving content that’s 90%+ spam and having to deal with it every day with no end in sight (barring de-federating Kbin completely). The only thing that sort-of works is hiding the Kbin magazines on my end, but that just hides the spam, too, and I’m still stuck storing it on my system.
So yeah, life for Lemmy admins would be easier if Kbin users would make the switch and I could just de-fed from Kbin without losing the good people.
I’m back in the game now. The issue with spam will be addressed next week.
Glad to hear that! 🎉
Great to hear! Hope things in your life are headed in a good direction, and thank you for the work you do. 🙇♂️
Ernest has been working on a major update, but it appears to be delayed.
Thank you for not simply defederating. Understood that something has to change with the spam problem and it’s been over a month of it being bad. Thanks again for managing the spam.
For people unaware, as Ernest is busy with personal matters, a group of people forked Kbin into https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin.
The main difference is that they are reviewing PRs together instead of relying on one person.
I applaud the mbin efforts, but the biggest *bin servers are still concentrated on a few Kbin servers. I don’t expect kbin.social to run mbin, but that seems to be one of the major influxes of spam on my server.
I don’t blame Ernest in the slightest for taking care of personal matters first, but I’m seriously considering defederating Kbin servers if this problem doesn’t get solved.
For what it’s worth, Ernest has returned and is back to work (he’s posted once or twice in the last day or two, starting a daily update for everyone). I think he said today should see an update pushed out (iirc the one which will allow transfer of magazine ownership), so things are finally moving again.
Edit: https://kbin.social/m/kbinDevlog/t/609581/kbin-RTR-7-Summary-of-the-week-preview-of-the-kbin-social found it.
That’s good to hear! I only seem to get spam once every week or so because I don’t follow that many kbin magazines, so I’ll just see and wait how things pan out for now.
Told ya it was coming soon lol! https://kbin.social/m/kbinDevlog/t/615294/kbin-RTR-9-Protection-against-spam-and-several-optimization-improvements
I would just defederate and tell those users if they want to see your instance then they’d better clean up their own first.
Would you invite someone over to your house who makes a mess every time? Eventually you’re going to get sick of cleaning up their messes and tell them to stop coming to your house.
Kbin mods probably do clean up their own.
But their cleaning doesn’t federate (ie a mod deleting a post won’t issue a federation deletion request)
The amount of spam is horrendous. Once we get the instance blocking feature, I’ll be blocking Kbin immediately.
Yes, if you read the post you’ll see that it’s an issue with Kbin not federating properly.
I’m against lemmy for the fact that introducing new users is a pain in the ass. Tell em to type lemmy into google and you get stuff about a musician. Tell them about kbin and they get stuff about the fediverse. Lemmy is just a really bad name.
Alternatively, you should switch to KBin.
As a kbin user myself I don’t think that’s a good solution to the issue. If one vehicle on the road is splashing all the others with manure then the solution isn’t just for everyone to get into that one vehicle …
Well, it solves the problem. I agree the solution is ridiculous. But that’s my point - it is as ridiculous as the “unpopular opinion” of the original post.
