I'm the mod for @food, and we've had a spam problem. New spam accounts are created daily, and I ban them and delete their posts daily. But, users from other instances have informed me that some of the posts are still showing on those instances, even ones that were deleted more than a week ago on kbin.

As an example, there are spam posts up at https://lemm.ee/c/food@kbin.social that are not visible on kbin, such as those by users veteya and magdor. I specifically recall removing those posts from kbin.

A clue as to what is going wrong may be in the moderation log for @food. Even though posts by those users were deleted, the deletions do not show up in the moderation log. Supporting this theory, for any post I've checked that shows as deleted in the moderation log, I do not see that post on lemm.ee.

I also recall a few times (maybe with those posts) where I deleted a post and was met with an error screen after the fact. But, the posts were gone when I checked, so I didn't think anything of it.

Is there any way for me to force these old deletions to propagate across the fediverse? And, is there anything I need to do differently to ensure future deletions propagate?