and is there anything we, kbin, or the wider fediverse can do to combat them?
I realise they’re probably solely an issue to users like me, who frequently browse all and by newest, because of the relative dearth of content here compared to reddit, so the verdict might so not be no further action is needed. and admittedly, it’s not hard to just scroll past their posts.
It’s partly specific to the kbin software, and partly specific to kbin.social. The biggest problem is that the software doesn’t currently support having more than one administrator account per instance.
The flagship instance, kbin.social, is administered by ernest, who is also the lead developer of the project. Working on the software seems to keep him plenty busy, to the point where he’s not able to keep up with administrator tasks.
Since kbin.social was (I assume) not used by very many people before the reddit migration, almost all the older magazines are owned by ernest, and have no other moderators set. There’s also a large number of magazines that were created during the migration, but have since been abandoned by their owners. Reassigning these is a task that currently only ernest can do.
And of course as the most populated instance, kbin.social is a more desirable target for spammers, compared to the other kbin instances.