There have been a number of comment spam attacks in various posts in a couple of /c’s that I follow by a user/individual who uses account names like Thulean*
For example: ThuleanSneed@lemmy.tf in !coffee@lemmy.world
and ThuleanPerspective2@eviltoast.org in !anime@ani.social
edit: Also ThuleanSneed@startrek.website in !startrek@startrek.website
The posts have been removed or deleted by the respective /c’s mods, and the offending accounts banned, but you can see the traces of them in those /c’s modlogs.
The comments consist of an all-caps string of words with profanities, and Simpsons memes.
An attack on a post may consist of several repeated or similar looking comments.
This looks like a bored teenager prank, but it may also be an organization testing Lemmy’s systemic and collective defenses and ability to respond against spam and bot posts.
I mean it’s possible, but lemmy only has ~50k monthly active users. Reddit, on the other hand, is in the millions (>400M monthly active users last year, and >50M daily active users). Lemmy just isn’t anywhere in the ballpark of being a threat to anyone.
I also think Lemmy has some architectural issues that will make it very difficult to scale to anywhere near Reddit size, even if it somehow gets the users.
It’s a cool service, I just highly doubt it’s the target of any big campaign. And that’s a big part of why I’m here, it’s big enough to have interesting communities, but small enough to avoid most of the spam.