Wondering if the fediverse - and Mastodon in particular - is undergoing a major spam / bot signup wave at the moment.
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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.
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@_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.
@renchap yup I completely understand.
I love all the options that Mastodon gives us - like turning on manual approvals, easily removing followers, etc.
I suppose I'll have to see these as bad weeds that I need to eradicate regularly while tending my lovely Fedi garden
️ 
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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 it may vary from server to server, but im my personal circles it tends to indicate newbies in Fediverse
especially ones, who thought that You have to register for different instances and tools ¯\_(ツ)_/¯On the wider circles, it may be, it may be. And during last couple of years or so, it definitely comes in waves.
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@aleksei I've noticed so many of these kinds lately - ughhhh. Bad Meta vibes
@_elena what are they doing here, really? I'd imagine an average fedi user is somewhat nerdy and interested in tech, so these blatant spam attacks shouldn't be that effective. Yet these attacks happen again and again, so they should be getting something in return
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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 Tbh, not sure why they'd be making accounts if they can already scrape logged out, unless it's for getting more info as logged in "users". Weird way of going about it, I'd've just messed with some AP-oriented API not half ass it like this lmao
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@_elena what are they doing here, really? I'd imagine an average fedi user is somewhat nerdy and interested in tech, so these blatant spam attacks shouldn't be that effective. Yet these attacks happen again and again, so they should be getting something in return
@aleksei consuming resources of those servers where they sign up? I don't know, really...
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@_elena it may vary from server to server, but im my personal circles it tends to indicate newbies in Fediverse
especially ones, who thought that You have to register for different instances and tools ¯\_(ツ)_/¯On the wider circles, it may be, it may be. And during last couple of years or so, it definitely comes in waves.
@KasTasMykolas true but some of these people have a name followed by a long string of numbers or random characters, no profile picture and no activity. from my dead bird site days (rip twitter), they make me think of spam accounts
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@KasTasMykolas true but some of these people have a name followed by a long string of numbers or random characters, no profile picture and no activity. from my dead bird site days (rip twitter), they make me think of spam accounts
@_elena and these are easy to notice
Generating "human-like" username and profile picture is not that difficult. -
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 🥲
To avoid spam and bots, @docpop once asked new registrations to his newsletter to send a hand drawn punk turtle. Which proved to work just fine, I believe. And it was fun too.
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@renchap yup I completely understand.
I love all the options that Mastodon gives us - like turning on manual approvals, easily removing followers, etc.
I suppose I'll have to see these as bad weeds that I need to eradicate regularly while tending my lovely Fedi garden
️ @_elena I also wonder if we should try to figure out a way to make follows less proeminent/important. It should not matter to you if a lot of no-activity accounts are following you, as it does not change anything to your experience.
I wonder what makes you want to curate the list of followers, while you post in public and everyone can read your posts anyway? Or is it because you sometimes post to followers-only (but as anyone can follow you, this does not really change much)
