Is anyone here familiar with coves.social? It's using a modified version of the Photon frontend, displaying Lemmy posts, and claims to use AT Protocol
We banned a spammer from this instance recently, and I went to see what instance it was coming from (in case there was more)
coves.social/community-guidelines
Coves is built on the AT Protocol, which means it’s part of a larger decentralized network. Your account and identity exist on your Personal Data Server (PDS), not on our servers. These guidelines and our moderation only apply to the official Coves AppView at coves.social. Other instances of Coves or other AT Protocol services have their own policies and moderation. If you’re banned or have content removed from our AppView, your AT Protocol identity and data on your PDS are unaffected — you can still use other services on the network.
They do credit Photon and they have released the source code for their modified frontend: coves.social/legal
I also found this on their GitHub: github.com/BrettM86/tidepool
Tidepool is a read-only ActivityPub → atproto bridge for the threadiverse. It follows Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin communities (FEP-1b12 group federation), materializes their posts, comments, and profiles as social.coves.* records in a virtual PDS it operates itself, and serves them over com.atproto.sync.* so the Coves AppView indexes fediverse communities exactly as it indexes native ones. Votes stay bridge-side as aggregates behind one sanctioned XRPC.
I think it’s neat that someone is working on this, but I’m a bit concerned that it’s read only from the threadiverse:
- They would suffer from a problem similar to what we have, when someone sets up a Reddit repost bot. Users interacting with some content while not knowing that their replies aren’t reaching the original poster
- they get content without giving content back
I'm the dev here if anyone has any questions, I was waiting till it was in a more finalized state to announce it. Also full transparency since this community is a little more sensitive on it, this project has been agentically built over the course of the last 1-2 years, but I am a SWE in my day job.
I'm sure most people here would be more curious about the ActivityPub -> atproto bridge, I call this Tidepool code is here: https://tangled.org/bretton.dev/tidepool
I'm planning full Lemmy / Piefed / Pylova federation, the goal is not only to be read only here! Ex my comment is from Coves! Communities themselves aren't being federated yet though.
OP I'd love to know what was spamming you, I can help tackle that we don't have many users and signups are disabled, but I do have some automated bot posts running but those shouldn't be federating yet.