A lot of mods have their own agenda. Not much different from all the politicians or really anyone who has been granted a position of negligible power. It's a human thing. Finding the forthright and true mods is the goal.

How exactly do you imagine moderating an instance works? As admins and mods, we don't sit in front of the user list all day watching what every user is up to. 80% of the time, we rely on accounts like that being reported.

The fediverse is, by intention, not controlled by any particular person or entity. It is not a "platform". So the answer is never.

This happens all the time. They fly under the radar for a moment until someone notices them. Then their accounts get banned.

Stermy4u was banned for promoting their AI plagiarism site.

Have you reported the other user? It's way less likely anyone will notice if they're not reported. If you report a post make sure to say that the user is a spammer so mods/admins will look at account activity.

and do what? only allow links to sanctioned websites?

before the web turned into the same 5 websites, it was perfectly normal to link to your own stuff. That's basically why the web grew into what it became.

As long as people aren't scamming and spamming, let them

It varies by instance. PieFed has "spam detection" (not really) which is just a list of the posts and comments that have been downvoted a lot in the last 3 days so it's easy for admins to spot unreported badness and take action. I don't know how often other admins do but I check that report multiple times per day.

For example I nuked unlogopoco from piefed.social a month ago

Looking at the modlog for stermy, I'm seeing a fair bit of moderation action being taken on them and very few posts since then:

On piefed.social I banned townflex.com entirely weeks ago, which must be why I'm not seeing their latest spams.

Basically Lemmy has really poor tools for this which makes mods and admins do a lot more work then necessary, causing them to burn out. If they used PieFed they'd have a much better time.

Sounds like a mod / admin issue. Users can downvote and report. Mods and admins can ban. If I were a mod, I'd make a rule for it ban those two and blacklist the sites. I looked at them and they do indeed look like autogenerated slop. As a user I'm gonna start downvoting and likely reporting.

The appropriate first action is to raise awareness, kinda like this post, except without the guilt tripping.

E: It looks like stermy4u is already banned.

If there's content you don't like, your best bet is to find an instance with similar ideals.

You control that. You block them. I dont think its actually against the rules. I dont like it either.

Hey, I promote my dinkum commercial enterprises on here all the time! Nobody's shot me for it.

...Yet.

lol.