They’re trying really hard to make their AI-plagiarized slop “news” site happen. You’ll see posts linking to primestories24 [dot] com but they’re AI slop regurgitating likely legit news articles. Every “reporter” has some generic profile that is most likely the system prompt used for everything they “write”.
If you see a post to that domain, report it as spam. The accounts all look similar to this:
- @Bellar36@beehaw.org
- @Belinda42@lemmy.wtf
- @tatyana43@piefed.ca
- @Graham43@sopuli.xyz
- @Belinda43@fedia.io
- @belinda35@piefed.social
- @PrimeStories247@lemmy.ca (First ban-evasion alt)
- @PrimeStories24@sh.itjust.works (Original account)
This list isn’t comprehensive.
Update: They are now using sockpuppet alts to vote/boost their posts. Just found @Babrah28@ttrpg.network that way and, surprise surprise, it was registered the same time as the latest batch.
Note: Technically the above is violating rule 7 if you consider spambots to be members. I don’t, but if this is a problem, let me know, and I’ll remove that part.
The domain was registered in May of 2026 and is roughly when these accounts started popping up.
Domain Name: PRIMESTORIES24.COM
Registry Domain ID: 3105727536_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.web4africa.net
Registrar URL: http://hostafrica.com/
Updated Date: 2026-06-19T10:01:29Z
Creation Date: 2026-05-31T12:16:00Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2027-05-31T12:16:00Z
Registrar: Host Africa (Pty.) Ltd.
Registrar IANA ID: 664
Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abuse@web4africa.net
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.6465850088
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
Name Server: DAN1.HOST-WW.NET
Name Server: DAN2.HOST-WW.NET
DNSSEC: unsigned
Admins, I’m aware Lemmy is severely lacking in moderation capability, but one thing it does have is domain blocking. That prevents posting to those domains and it now seems to prevent links to those domains from federating in.
Can Lemmy ban outgoing link URLs? Given the spread of slop websites, that seems like useful functionality… Could even combine it with an AI slop URL blacklist…
There were various Reddit automod bots that went after these, but then you had people trying to evade them by using one of the zillions of link shortener sites out there, so then you also have to ban link shorteners or try to resolve all the links (which may be a good idea as well, but saying that it’s a more-complicated problem than initially meets the eye).
Also, I was banned in a few communities by an automod bot on the Threadiverse, and given that it happened when I posted some comment linking to a number of sites, I assume that one of the URLs must have tripped some automod list, so I’m a little irritable about bots running permabans on blacklisted sites, as users can inadvertently link to them.
I’m of a mind that link shorteners should be banned everywhere. You should never click a link unless you know exactly where it’s going. Plus, some of them have interstitial ads and/or get deleted after a period of time, so even in the best case scenarios, they’re just spraying out ads and link rot when you get down to it.
Not to mention, they’re almost always used on platforms where you can just click on the link regardless of how long and/or unwieldy it is.
The only use case for bit [dot] ly and their ilk are if you need to publish a long link in print medium (such as a newspaper public notice or something) where a full link to a specific page would be unreasonable to expect people to type into a browser by hand.
Edit: Apparently it can do URLs and not just domains. See @flamingos@feddit.uk 's reply below.
URLS, no, but it can disallow specific domains. So it could work against specific spam domains but not against a bunch of accounts spamming, say, a Github repo, unless you want to block links to all of Github which isn’t ideal.There’s a list of disallowed domains that can be configured in the admin area. Until relatively recently, it would only prevent users of that instance from posting to them, but somewhat recently it now prevents inbound federation of anything linking to those. If something links to a blocked URL (post, comment, user with that in their bio, etc), Lemmy will reject it.I don’t know why more admins don’t look at the spam that gets modded and add the domain to their URL block list other than it being tedious work lol.
It does work on URLs. The https part gets stipped out because of how the regex is built internally, but you can absolutely block a Github repo. I have a Discord invite link in the feddit.uk one.
It always worked on federated content? It was added in response to a Mastodon spam wave (source: I added it).
Oh, nice. For some reason I assumed it was only domains.
I know it has for a good while but I forget when it was applied to inbound federation. I think it was that Mastodon/Misskey spam wave I was thinking of but don’t recall which version was running at the time and how I wished it would stop content to those domains from federating in. Nice contribution, BTW.
Thanks! I have also floated the idea of a regex blocklist, but Nutomic shot that down because ‘it can be done with a plugin’. Can’t wait until 1.0 so Lemmy can have feature parity with a 2006 forum.
I think that a heavyweight automod feature that works something like SpamAssassin, where one builds a training corpus of known spam and known ham, and then one writes a bunch of rules (e.g. “domain is less than X days old”, “account has less than N votes”, etc) and then runs it on the training corpus to auto-generate score weights for the rules, and then runs the rules on each post to provide an estimated “spam probability score” on given posts would probably scale better.
Doesn’t need to be built into Lemmy or Mbin or PieFed, and running as an automod bot, it’d be able to run on all of those platforms, share effort among them.
I don’t disagree, and the plugin system is cool as it’ll enable people to build things like that. I think SJW even has something like that already. But I can’t begin to tell you how much work a simple text filter would have saved me as an admin.
Seems like scripting that wouldn’t be a super heavy lift.