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 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) -
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...
The biggest argument against large instances, IMO. Too big to effectively moderate, too big to defederate without cutting your users off from half the fediverse.
(To be clear, I am not saying .social is there yet, and there are good reasons for having a reliable "central" instance while the fediverse is young!)
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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 can't speak to the weird usernames part but I'm new to mastodon and your account was recommended in the onboarding flow right after sign up. maybe that's why you're getting brand new accounts?
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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
You can push a follower away gently by blocking and then unblocking.Unless they're instance admin or keeping track of their follows they won't notice.
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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 Depending on the Fediverse API, server settings, your profile settings, etc., it is possible to see your friend list and their posts and build a network profile. These bots may not immediately engage in it, but in consort with other bots, can do some odd kinds of scraping, profiling, etc.
It's easier to profile you and your friends as a friend rather than from outside.
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@MichelPatrice awww brilliant move by @docpop
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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
You gave 1 example, but overall its big LLM spam wave. Especially on servers with open registration (still exist)
Not all admins takes care of their servers. I just seen LLM accounts on one such server discussing chat control vote, posting images, videos. Its getting increasingly more sophisticated. Some of your followers might be LLMs, and it will be increasingly difficult to notice. Its noticeable for admins themselves, but they may not care.
One tech solution is web of trust (qouted https://mastodon.0011.lt/@mindaugas/116812601404089404)
Another solution is small communities like @Bonfire recent feature https://bonfirenetworks.org/posts/bonfire-social-1-0-5-archipelago/
And practically it may be non-technical adhoc solutions here and now (as talked in that thread).
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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 Haven't been here for long, but I've noticed this as well. Expecting to see bots pushing political and corporate agendas similar to other platforms any time now. Hopefully Mastodon's bot detection can take care of it...
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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 why do they do that? What's the point? It's very frustrating. Can't we have a nice, human-only corner on the internet?
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@_elena Haven't been here for long, but I've noticed this as well. Expecting to see bots pushing political and corporate agendas similar to other platforms any time now. Hopefully Mastodon's bot detection can take care of it...
@0xAyanC for what it's worth, in the long list of new weird accounts I spotted, many of them were suspended by Mastodon...
