Hey folks

Some of you may have noticed comments complaining about spam and lack of moderation within the past day or so. Maybe you’ve even noticed a few spam posts yourself (hopefully not too much, as we have automations in place on lemm.ee to remove the spam as soon as it is posted).

I just wanted to write a quick post with some context about the attack, what we are doing about it, and how you can help.

Context

Allegedly, a group of kids in Japan have created a bot, which signs up on different Fediverse instances and posts spam into different communities. The spam generally consists of Japanese text and/or an image and/or a bunch of random @mentions into different communities. You can check a post on Mastodon with more information here: https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/111940301222380638

What we are doing about it

Many instances are actively working to limit this spam-wave, and lemm.ee is no different. Thankfully, we have not had to deal with any bot sign-ups on our instance (potentially as a result of different protections we have implemented for sign-ups), but we still suffer the effects of the spam, even if it’s posted from other instances. To help us quickly eliminate most of the spam for lemm.ee users, I am continually tuning our @adminbot to automatically detect and remove content posted in this current spam-wave.

We cannot remove content from the wider Fediverse if it’s not posted there by a lemm.ee user, so our automated removals won’t help users on other instances, but we are at least improving the experience for our own users. For an example, you can compare how /c/[email protected] currently looks like on lemm.ee, to how it looks like on this screenshot I took from another smaller instance:

How you can help

First and foremost, please continue reporting any spam you find, so that relevant mods and admins can deal with it. I am very grateful to users who help us identify spam through reports, and your reports are precisely what allow me to implement automated content removal for more extreme spam-waves such as this current one.

Secondly, I am seeking for a few volunteers to grow the lemm.ee admin team. I am purposely burying this at the bottom of the post, to hopefully pre-filter out some candidates who would want to join for the wrong reasons. If you have read until this point in the post, then I assume you are already quite interested in improving the experience on lemm.ee, so if you feel like you could contribute to the admin team, please read on.

First, I will say a few words about who we are looking for, then I will describe what kind of tasks you would have as an admin, and finally, I will cover some significant downsides of joining the admin team.

We are looking for folks who more or less match the following profile:

• You have already been active on the Fediverse for several months (not necessarily on lemm.ee)
• Previous mod experience would be a huge plus
• You should feel a strong agreement with our basic instance rules and our administration & federation policy
• You should be prepared to be exposed to some vile content through reports
• You are OK with using Discord as the main method of admin communication (that is what we have settled on and will continue using for the foreseeable future)

As volunteers, we don’t expect admins to be available 24/7, but as our instance grows, I do think it would be quite important to achieve a state of pretty good timezone coverage with our admin team, so please only consider applying if you are already regularly active on Lemmy.

As for what tasks admins are responsible are for: it’s mostly covered in the administration policy post linked above. But in short, you should be prepared to regularly check the report queue, contact users with friendly messages to de-escalate conflicts, issue bans, remove content, and monitor the activity of @adminbot. Additionally, if you’re interested in taking a more hands-on approach to any kind of community-building on lemm.ee, then this would be totally welcome as well, but not strictly considered a core responsibility for admins.

Please note that the lemm.ee admin team has an absolute zero tolerance policy against any kind of abuse towards minority communities. If you do not share this mindset, then please do not consider applying.

Finally, let me share some negative aspects about joining the admin team. I think this will probably reduce the amount of any potential candidates, but I still feel it’s important to be honest and upfront about this:

Through the report queue, you will regularly see absolutely vile content which you might otherwise never even notice on Lemmy. Many users come to Lemmy to spread hate, post disturbing images, etc, and in order to clean such content up for other users, mods and admins need to actually be exposed to this content in much larger amounts than regular users.

Additionally, while Lemmy is constantly being improved by the developers, the moderation tools are still quite rough around the edges. Lemmy is not at 1.0 yet, and that will most likely become even more obvious to you as you work on admin tasks.

Maybe this is the most important one: no matter what you do, there will always be people unhappy with how you apply our rules. I have seen countless comments complaining about lemm.ee admins specifically. I have been told by complete strangers that they hate me. I have seen many complaints about us moderating too harshly. I have seen complaints about us not moderating enough. I have seen users on Lemmy make up wild stories about our admin team, and share them as facts. There are of course plenty of supportive users, but the negative experiences tend to leave a much more lasting impression.

If after reading all of the above, you are still motivated to help make lemm.ee a better place through offering your help in the admin team, please contact me on Discord (@sunaurus)!

That’s all from me for now. Thank you very much to anybody who went through this whole wall of text, and I hope you are all having a good weekend!