I think the spam campaign today was minimally disruptive today.

I think the spam campaign today was minimally disruptive today. The mastodon team does a nice job of providing resources to quickly counter them. The spams came from new accounts registered almost exclusively on “abandon” fediverse instances - I found it interesting that this one included misskey in addition to mastodon instances. There were a few notable exceptions of active instances that were being used, but there were only a handful of those.

I did take the time to suspend instances that were hosting the spam and were abandon - i.e., no active management, no recent legitimate recent activity. There were some surprises in that list, not gonna lie.

I do think that we have to continue sorting out how, as a network, to handle the risks posed by these abandon instances. I know it’s not popular, but I am thinking about suspending instances that are very out of date (this is tough because of forks) or where all of the recent (2-3 months) posts are spam.

Siguza

@jerry what I as a (non-admin/non-mod) user would like is some form of mass-report/mass-block functionality. Where you get a list of the last, idk, 500 posts that mention you, you just check a box in front of the spam ones, and then you hit "report & block all", with maybe a temp domain block as well or smth. Certainly would've saved me some time today - but then again, it's the first time spam has ever gotten through to me on Mastodon at all. And I know this could be done with a userscript, but... let's hope there won't be a reason for me to go and write one.

Emelia 👸🏻

@siguza @jerry Might be possible to have with the new filtered notifications view in 4.3? i.e., spam will likely end up there anyway

Aleksandra Lesya

@jerry it could be interesting to ask the dev team to add an "auto" ban switch for any instance where the admin or any mod didn't log in for 6 month

Renaud Chaput

@girlintech @jerry We (Mastodon) introduced a feature a few months ago where registrations closes themselves if no admin or moderator signed in during the past 2 weeks (and it sends an email to them). This helps a lot, but it is only for Mastodon (many of the current affected instances are Misskey), and not very old and never updated instances