I’m sure many of you have noticed the spam wave hitting !capitalismindecay@lemmygrad.ml. You may have also seen similar posts getting spammed in !opensource@lemmy.ml and !asklemmy@lemmy.ml.
I was recently shared a link to this post by someone who learned more about what was going on. It turns out it’s a false flag by a cybercriminal group trying to make it look like the person who DDoSed a very lucrative discord bot they run is spamming various fediverse communities. Oddly enough, both the cybercriminal group and the person being implicated in the false flag are all children.
Annoying. Just the same I hope admins take certain action to mitigate this now and ruminate on ways to mitigate it further in the future with the flip of a switch (perhaps a switch mods of communities can flip to temporarily restrict posting from all other instances, put them in a mod-queue something like that).
Another option might be for a mod power to be created that allows mods with it to spam-hide all content from a given instance temporarily and kick the problem up to admins in a queue for review, perhaps make sure it checks against an allow-list that admins can create of trusted instances that cannot be spam-hidden from (which a rogue or compromised mod could use to wreak havoc), such a list could be populated manually with top active instances or by a periodic process that looks for a certain amount of historical activity from a given instance that hasn’t been removed and if an instance has for some time had positive interactions it gets added to this soft allow-list.
Fediverse does need better spam controls IMO because things like this at scale and more frequent are draining to human mods and annoying to users.