From the PR standpoint, I don't think it's worth it, and it'd be better to just leave it on reports.

The problem is that we can't rely on reports of DMs since lemmy doesn't federate them to us.

E.g.
-> troll@programming.dev makes a new account and sends harassment to victim@lemmy.instance
-> victim@lemmy.instance reports the DMs from troll@programming.dev
-> We, the admins of programming.dev, do not see this report because lemmy does not federate the DM report and troll@programming.dev can continue harassing others because we never find out about it.

This isn't just a theoretical, it happened just last month that one of our users (1 day old account) sent rape and death threats (which were reported), and we found out about it by pure chance when talking to admins from the other instance.

And just to clarify, the tool only automatically monitors new accounts, i.e. accounts that are being registered today. If you account is more than a few weeks old, the tool doesn't monitor any of your activity.

We'll take the fact that you haven't noticed much spam as a compliment.

The most recent spam that we have seen is harassment/doxxing campaigns that target specific users. It's not something the average user would notice as the harassment is often DMs or pings on random posts. That, and a ban evader with a recognisable writing style.

As you pointed out, there is no monetary interest on our end. We are just volunteers looking to fix the blindpots in the moderation tools. We have no interest in needlessly censoring speech, and if you ever feel we moderate the instance too harshly, we are open to taking feedback. You can always check the modlog to see our activity. The guidelines for our moderation can be seen here.

We will have a review of how we write posts and follow up in the comments later today to make sure we are clearer in our communication, and that we don't end up with 3 different admins chiming in on separate comments.

I still don’t like it, but if you are disclosing it properly and you’re not offshoring the data that is monitored, that will earn you some goodwill.

We try to always make pinned announcements when making notable changes to our operation to keep the community informed. Any changes, minor or major, that we believe our users would want to know, we will always post about here.

It really sounds like Lemmy software is trailing behind on keeping up with the bots.

Lemmy is trailing behind when it comes to moderation tools just in general, which is what that is forcing us to make our own tools to help with moderation.

• We only monitor new users on our instance, the tool is written by the admin team and no personal data is sent out of the server. The tool operates on the server communicating directly with the lemmy database on the server.
• Other instances have their methods I'm sure, we haven't cooperated with any other instances with this tool. I'm sure there's a spectrum of 100% pure manual moderation to a highly automated process.
• The tool scans for typical patterns we see in the trolls. Some of the patterns I'm sure you can guess, such as using slurs or uploading images. The tool temporarily removes the content and pings the admin team so that we can manually verify the content and restore it.
• No it's a problem across the fediverse, it seems to be people being banned from various instances that creates new accounts to evade bans. We have seen harassment campaigns where the user creates new accounts on multiple instances and attacks the victim via comments and DMs before moving on to the next instance to repeat the harassment.
• That would only fix the issue for the duration of new applications being closed.

There isn't anything new in regards to privacy with this move. We are just adding a tool to help flag content quicker, and we want to be transparent about out moderation. That's why we made our admin guidelines public.

Please avoid insulting users in your comments

Good point, I think I misunderstood OPs post

c/die_reklame has been set to hidden by an admin due to being a community primarily driven by a bot, but it seems like it wasn't added to the public hidden communities list. That's our mistake, we will update the list to show it as hidden.

Hiding communities isn't something done by moderators, it's something we do at an admin level according to our instance's policy.

I haven't hidden the community yet and the post is visible both on the standard frontend and the tesseract frontend. Not quite sure what's going on in OP's picture, checking the database, all the recent posts seem normal.

https://programming.dev/c/britishtelly@feddit.uk is currently visible and not hidden.

However, as it seems to be a bot community, it should be hidden on our instance, so we will hide it and update https://legal.programming.dev/docs/hidden-communities to reflect that.

It's not about the profanity itself, it's about what language the trolls/harassers typically use. The comment containing profanity was restored after it was seen to not be harassment. Most new users doesn't trigger the automod in the supervision period.

The instance has experienced a lot of trolls signing up recently, so we need to moderate new accounts more strictly. The automated removal is needed to respond quickly to potential harassment. The comment was restored after manual review.

Bot is online again