A lot of the larger abandoned magazines are just spam pools now. I don’t see their posts in my feed, but I don’t like that the two sidesbars of random posts and threads are now just spam advertising sidebars. I triedblocking the magazines, but doesn’t that prevent the posts from showing in those sidebars.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love it when m/infosec advertises voodoo curses and revenge spells, but after the first time the joke wears thin, you know?
Most of the content being federated to my instance from kbin appears to be mostly adverts for websites selling pharmaceuticals - usually advertising controlled substances.
After a couple from the same magazine(? kbin’s term?) I just block the community. But it’s pretty non-stop. I guess it’s not yet considered to be worth defederating, but yowsa.
Yep, Magazine = Community.
Kbin got the same rexodus boost as lemmy but since then has many more atrophied communities and far fewer moderaters to do anything about it, hence spamalot.
I’ve only seen 1 or 2 pieces of spam in my feed and that was months back - interesting that you seem to be seeing more of it on a federated server. I only started blocking those magazines when I noticed the spam on desktop sidebars.
I just saw another one in random(@kbin.social), so I jumped in and scrolled back; there were only a couple in the past two days, but three days ago there was a series of several posts in a row (6? 8? Something like that).
I an not subscribed to any kbin magazines, so I don’t see them in my curated feed; they mostly show up in the uncurated “World.”
FWIW; you expressed curiosity, so I followed up with an example.
It’s weird. And it’s all pharma. Buy oxy! Buy Valium! I haven’t seen much other spam lately; a couple of months ago, it was thinly veiled product line stuff: “such-and-such company provides high-quality tools for Y industry” stuff, but back then I wasn’t noticing it was specifically coming from kbin. That’s all gone away, and now it’ll be a run of a half-dozen “Canadian” pharma adverts in the unfiltered World feed.
It’ll be interesting to see what solution some enterprising person comes up with. It’ll involve an LLM, no doubt.
Unforcunately the admin\creator of kbin has personal issues and is missing. We need to leave, but that means migrating manually which is annoying. Too bad, there are some good idas here.
If your main goal is exporting your magazine subscriptions between accounts across instances, may I suggest trying EXIT tool. If you are looking for more complex export settings (friends/favorites?), unfortunately, only subscriptions are supported at this time.
A few suggestions that may or may not be satisfactory for you:
Using KES, enable
General > Hide sidebar elements > Random threads, Random mags, Random posts. The randomly populated sidebar is fundamentally flawed; I suggest disabling its content altogether.Next, enable
General > Filter advertisements. This second feature is by no means foolproof, but will reduce a lot of noise, and is periodically updated on a rolling basis.
