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 🥲
@_elena me too
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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 🥲
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?
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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 oh, so we shouldn't pray three times a day in your general direction? * Puts away prayer mat *
/j -
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 is there a pattern in what server they’re on? Most spam I have to deal with is on mastodon.social, unfortunately.
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@_elena is there a pattern in what server they’re on? Most spam I have to deal with is on mastodon.social, unfortunately.
@jvnknvlgl ah yes, after checking I can see they are all from mastodon.social. I'm on it too, though
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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'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).
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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
