It’s not as easy as moderating individual posts. Remember, Lemmy is decentralized. If you start your own Lemmy server and I federated with it, I’ll get all the stuff you post on my instance too (intentionally oversimplified).

Its up to you to moderate communities on your instance the way you see fit, and up to me to moderate mine. Even though our instances are federated, I can’t moderate on your behalf. It just isn’t feasible both in terms of the technology and in terms of the sheer volume of content you would have to try to moderate.

If you have a community that posts a mix of things I agree with and things I don’t, I really only have a couple options on my end. Basically I can block that community on my instance or block your instance altogether.

The reason why someone might block a community may be more about the legal risk than any moral justification. Depending on where you are, it might be illegal to even host that information. And since Lemmy instances cache posts from other instances, it could be argued that because that community is federated with your instance, you’re responsible for the content posted there.

I’m an tired of these mother fucking mambas in this mother fucking mall

Gorilla. No doubt in my mind. It’s a hell of a lot easier to keep track of where one gorilla is compared to 5 black snakes.

One gorilla will probably ignore me as long as I keep my distance. Keeping distance and even putting a wall or 3 between you and the gorilla is trivial in a place as large as a mall.

On the other hand, snakes might mostly ignore me, but since I don’t know where the fuckers are, it’s a lot easier to accidentally startle or threaten one.

My new best friend friend Coco isn’t coming through pipes, air ducts, holes in walls, etc. Big strong boi isn’t hiding in the corner of a closet waiting to bite me as I reach in to grab a snack.

I’d go to the food court, put out a cornucopia of food, make sure the gorilla sees me leave it there for them, bow respectfully and slink away, then spend the rest of the 24 hours clear on the opposite side of the mall.

This all assumes that the gorilla isn’t enraged for any particular reason or starving. But even if so, I think gorilla is the safer answer, just the evasion technique changes.

That said, if I wanted to spam the Fediverse, I’d just spin up my own instance of Lemmy or Mastodon.

Its actually smarter for spammers to infiltrate populated servers. Admins aren’t going to have a problem defederating from a pure spam instance. They’ll think twice about defederating from an instance with lots of legit users.

I saw a little of it. Then I saw the offending instances quickly banned. Then I saw a comment from the admin that they didn’t like having to implement bans of entire instances, but it became a necessity until admin of those offending instances took action.

I dunno, seems like it is working exactly as intended to me.

And it’s far better than a monolithic tech giant. Pointing at Mastodon and calling out spam is utterly silly when compared to the amount of spam on large services. This article reads like a hit piece sponsored by Xitter.