The federation between mastodon and lemmy is strange. If a M account wants to follow a L community, they need to follow an automated M account which represents the L community. But if any M post mentions that L community, the post will get boosted by the community’s M account, so everybody who follows will get a notification. And I’m not sure if this can be moderated from the L side, because it seems like it never goes through L. Such as - do you see this @opensource ? Does a L mod see this?
@caos Yes, true, notification wasn’t the right term. They will see it as a post from someone they follow. The problem is that I don’t think the mods of the L community are able to ban M accounts from mentioning the L community, or prevent the reboost on the M side. Which means this kind of event is going to slip through. Or at least that’s how I currently understand it, I’m trying to find out if it’s really the case - who can moderate these spam mentions?
They can, same as any other account.
@Corgana I’d really like to take your word for it, but do you happen to have any more info about it, how does it actually work? Because mind you, the post is no originating from lemmy, it only mentions that community and is automatically reboosted, so even if the lemmy mod deletes it from the community page, when and how does it get unboosted from all the mastodon timelines? I can still see 3-4 spam posts per hour in my timeline even when they don’t appear here on lemmy.
You had asked about a ban, which is possible. I’m actually not sure how post removals are interpreted by Mastodon.
That all said, it’s clunky to view one app via the other just because they both “speak” activitypub and recommended to have separate accounts.
I don’t know what options there are for admins. lemmy.ml could (temporarily) defederate the instances from which the spam comes. From all Mastodon instances that have a completely free registration, at the moment spam is distributed through the whole fediverse. Lemmy users can block individual accounts, but I don’t think this is possible with a whole instance.