418

Is it just me, or does it feel like Lemmy is being hit with a wave of political spam? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 months ago by voluble@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

203 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I notice a large number of ragebait-y political communities being spun up by new users with thousands of posts & ai profile header photos. I notice comment sections are more acrimonious, and foreign disinfo talking points are circulating a lot more prolifically than before the US election started ramping up.

Anyone else notice this? Any idea on how to combat it on this platform? Are there any communities built around creating block lists of obvious troll/ai/disinfo accounts & communities?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] breakingcups@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago

Every Lemmy instance can see which other fediverse instances they're connected to, I'd be satisfied if it scoped to those instance domains. It's going to be very rare to have a link to a Lemmy/kbin/whatever instance that is not already being followed by one local user, and when it does happen, the first time any local user follows it, it's fixed again. That covers the 99% of cases better than having to educate every user every time in every thread they innocently post a normal url instead of knowing how to even copy this special url from.

[-] ShittyKopper@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

True, that will at least let you figure out what is a fediverse link and what isn't. Most implementations I know either use the same URL for both the AP representation of a post and it's HTML one (differentiated by the Accept header), or have a redirect from the HTML view to the AP representation when an AP type is requested (or, very rarely, the via Link header/ html tag), which means you can reuse code used for the "search URL to load community" feature in order to make this possible.

Given the list of fedi instances your instance is aware of is already present in the API, clients already have the tools to do this, I believe.

this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024

418 points (90.8% liked)

Ask Lemmy

27036 readers

833 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world

Rules: (interactive)

1) Be nice and; have fun

Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them

2) All posts must end with a '?'

This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?

3) No spam

Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.

4) NSFW is okay, within reason

Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].

5) This is not a support community.

It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.

Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.