Perhaps this isn’t new, as I’ve only been on Lemmy for around 3 months, but up until this point I hadn’t noticed spam, advertising, scams, etc at all on Lemmy. However, within the last 2 days I’ve seen at least 3 examples of obvious spam posts, made by accounts clearly dedicated to that purpose. Has anyone else noticed this? And are there steps we could take to counter it (perhaps a report button)?
How do you detect URL shorteners? Simply by checking for a redirect using curl, or do you check against a list of urls? Domain review would be a lot of work to implement, i hope we can avoid that.
I currently just use a list of known URL shorteners domain names, and it reduced the spam a bit on the subreddit I moderate.
Problem is that someone needs to maintain that list.
Every list needs a maintainer ;)
EDIT: Here’s a preliminary list
https://github.com/m-p-3/domain-lists/blob/main/url-shorteners
And that maintainer needs to be trusted. But if we manage without a list, there is no need for extra trust nor maintenance work.
Fair point.