Wondering if the fediverse - and Mastodon in particular - is undergoing a major spam / bot signup wave at the moment.
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@_elena And I'm currently trying to migrate to https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2 because it's much lighter than Mastodon, while still staying within the Fediverse. However, I'm not happy because in the Fediverse, if I migrate to another platform, I can't migrate my posts, only my contacts... I thought the Fediverse was capable of handling portability, but that’s not the case yet.
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@_elena
I'd always recommend manual approvals, just so you can see who is following you and maybe follow back :3Also, yes, there are quite a few bots around doing stuff. Since my instance (that runs on quite the low power VPS) is only for me and a few friends, I have turned on Admin approval for registrations and astonishingly, I get quite a few signup requests that always have an LLM feeling summary for why they want to sign up.
Also I try to block instances that are either like not acceptable due to ethical concerns (mainly a whole bunch of meta servers) or because they are spammy. Furthermore since the signup requests I also added E-Mail blocks for some domains I know are bad (for example there is an email service where AI agents can just signup, specially made for them).
@Wolkensteine yes I just turned on manual approvals... I'm on mastodon.social and most of the new weird accounts following me are on this same instance... le sigh
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This is more of an instance issue where they have open registration and poor quality moderation.
Unfortunately MS has this reputation. Maybe an alternative instance or start your own?
@simonzerafa great point. I already have a self-hosted account - on GoToSocial - so I'm not really looking forward to migrating to it. I like the separation. But I turned on manual approvals just now
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@Wolkensteine yes I just turned on manual approvals... I'm on mastodon.social and most of the new weird accounts following me are on this same instance... le sigh
@_elena
One little annoyance I had with the fedi bridge to Bluesky (and if there weren't two cool non profits only over there I'd probably just unbridge) is that I can not stop people from following me. I can reject the follow request in my UI but the fedi bridge seems to still remember that someone wanted to follow me and I am not sure if my posts still get fedirated to that person. -
Wondering if the fediverse - and Mastodon in particular - is undergoing a major spam / bot signup wave at the moment.
I'm noticing an uptick in people following me who have weird usernames (lots of numbers), no profile photo, and 0 followers - I'd say 90% of new followers from the past week or two. (Disclaimer: I don't like the word "follower", it sounds cultish)
What gives?
Treasuring the human connections I've made here and this is a bit unsettling TBH.
I may turn on manual approvals 🥲
@_elena We treasure you!
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@_elena And I'm currently trying to migrate to https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2 because it's much lighter than Mastodon, while still staying within the Fediverse. However, I'm not happy because in the Fediverse, if I migrate to another platform, I can't migrate my posts, only my contacts... I thought the Fediverse was capable of handling portability, but that’s not the case yet.
@souverain actually with SLURP you can migrate your entire Mastodon post archive to GoToSocial... possibly snac too? @joel and @box464 have do it (Mastodon to GtS)
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@jvnknvlgl ah yes, after checking I can see they are all from mastodon.social. I'm on it too, though
@_elena I guess that’s a side effect of having an (unintentional) flagship server.
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Wondering if the fediverse - and Mastodon in particular - is undergoing a major spam / bot signup wave at the moment.
I'm noticing an uptick in people following me who have weird usernames (lots of numbers), no profile photo, and 0 followers - I'd say 90% of new followers from the past week or two. (Disclaimer: I don't like the word "follower", it sounds cultish)
What gives?
Treasuring the human connections I've made here and this is a bit unsettling TBH.
I may turn on manual approvals 🥲
@_elena I have heard from several instance maintainers that maybe 80-90% of requests for an account are bots masquerading as real people.
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@souverain actually with SLURP you can migrate your entire Mastodon post archive to GoToSocial... possibly snac too? @joel and @box464 have do it (Mastodon to GtS)
@_elena @souverain @box464
SLURP works with all instances that have a similar API to the one Mastodon has, so things like GoToSocial.SNAC2 seems to have a compatible API so this should work.
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Wondering if the fediverse - and Mastodon in particular - is undergoing a major spam / bot signup wave at the moment.
I'm noticing an uptick in people following me who have weird usernames (lots of numbers), no profile photo, and 0 followers - I'd say 90% of new followers from the past week or two. (Disclaimer: I don't like the word "follower", it sounds cultish)
What gives?
Treasuring the human connections I've made here and this is a bit unsettling TBH.
I may turn on manual approvals 🥲
As a moderator of quite a few instances - yes!
There's a huge spam wave at the moment and it's not slowing down. I no longer think it's a wave, I think this is just the spam sea rising
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@_elena I have heard from several instance maintainers that maybe 80-90% of requests for an account are bots masquerading as real people.
@rstub same. I've also read that AI agents may be contributing to lots of signups, ughhhhhh
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As a moderator of quite a few instances - yes!
There's a huge spam wave at the moment and it's not slowing down. I no longer think it's a wave, I think this is just the spam sea rising
@saskia oh no
thanks for letting me know Saskia. FYI I turned on manual approvals -
@simonzerafa great point. I already have a self-hosted account - on GoToSocial - so I'm not really looking forward to migrating to it. I like the separation. But I turned on manual approvals just now
Yes, You probably know more about this than I do, being a leading expert
Many of the issues we see are from MS for moderation
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Wondering if the fediverse - and Mastodon in particular - is undergoing a major spam / bot signup wave at the moment.
I'm noticing an uptick in people following me who have weird usernames (lots of numbers), no profile photo, and 0 followers - I'd say 90% of new followers from the past week or two. (Disclaimer: I don't like the word "follower", it sounds cultish)
What gives?
Treasuring the human connections I've made here and this is a bit unsettling TBH.
I may turn on manual approvals 🥲
I know the admins on both of the instances I’m on spend an inordinate amount of time checking out accounts that want to join. It’s not automatic anymore, which is good for users and hard on admins. That’s why I support them with monthly donations.
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Yes, You probably know more about this than I do, being a leading expert
Many of the issues we see are from MS for moderation
@simonzerafa @_elena
Sorry, with MS you mean Mastodon and not Microsoft, right?
Generally speaking, it not just mastodon.social having this problem – as you said – it is a problem of moderation, although it is especially on large Mastodon instances, since most bots can work with the API of mastodon but not something like Misskey or Pleroma.
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Wondering if the fediverse - and Mastodon in particular - is undergoing a major spam / bot signup wave at the moment.
I'm noticing an uptick in people following me who have weird usernames (lots of numbers), no profile photo, and 0 followers - I'd say 90% of new followers from the past week or two. (Disclaimer: I don't like the word "follower", it sounds cultish)
What gives?
Treasuring the human connections I've made here and this is a bit unsettling TBH.
I may turn on manual approvals 🥲
An update: I wonder if #agenticAI has anything to do with the uptick in suspicious, bot-like accounts that have been following me lately.
One such follower had picked as username "agent_test".
I like that I can manually remove them. I guess I'll need to go on a cleanup spree soon 🥲
And yes I turned on manual approvals...
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Wondering if the fediverse - and Mastodon in particular - is undergoing a major spam / bot signup wave at the moment.
I'm noticing an uptick in people following me who have weird usernames (lots of numbers), no profile photo, and 0 followers - I'd say 90% of new followers from the past week or two. (Disclaimer: I don't like the word "follower", it sounds cultish)
What gives?
Treasuring the human connections I've made here and this is a bit unsettling TBH.
I may turn on manual approvals 🥲
@_elena I only got one follower today, but their profile description suggested they could help me obtain unthinkable riches.
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@_elena I only got one follower today, but their profile description suggested they could help me obtain unthinkable riches.
@aleksei I've noticed so many of these kinds lately - ughhhh. Bad Meta vibes
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Wondering if the fediverse - and Mastodon in particular - is undergoing a major spam / bot signup wave at the moment.
I'm noticing an uptick in people following me who have weird usernames (lots of numbers), no profile photo, and 0 followers - I'd say 90% of new followers from the past week or two. (Disclaimer: I don't like the word "follower", it sounds cultish)
What gives?
Treasuring the human connections I've made here and this is a bit unsettling TBH.
I may turn on manual approvals 🥲
@_elena Honest question: Whats the harm? As long as they are not spamming. We have all the tools at our disposal, blocking them, whole instances even.
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An update: I wonder if #agenticAI has anything to do with the uptick in suspicious, bot-like accounts that have been following me lately.
One such follower had picked as username "agent_test".
I like that I can manually remove them. I guess I'll need to go on a cleanup spree soon 🥲
And yes I turned on manual approvals...
@_elena it’s not new, it’s getting worse, and there is no real good way to detect this without impacting potential real users. It becomes easier when they start to spam, but when someone signs up you have, at best, an IP address (which is most often a random ISP somewhere in the world through a proxy/botnet) and an email address (recently, often from outlook.com). If you start mass-actikg on this you will very likely block real humans.
