Here is a quick status update on the current Spam attack.
We have limited 125 instances now. It appears that most of these instances are completely unmoderated.
From what I could read, the attacker is a single person from Japan, who abuses instances with open pre-approved registrations.
Four users on our instance are the primary target of these spam posts and I send my regrets for the trouble they have to go through.
A community member has provided a moderation tool to quickly catch these spam posts and suspend the domains, but it still is a manual process and requires a considerable amount of time. Every time I turn around to my coffee machine and come back, there is new spam. So do not be surprised when you see spam in your notifications, which then disappears after a few minutes. That's just us cleaning up 🙂
I especially thank our 4 moderators, who are very engaged in quickly responding to reports over the course of the weekend. ♥️
I do not expect this spam attack to end any time soon. ActivityPub was designed this way. Anyone can spin up a server and be part of the network. There will be copycats.
This exposes a grave lack of moderation capabilities in the Mastodon software in particular. Many admins have called for such facilities for a long while, created Pull Requests in their free time with solutions, but have been ignored by the Mastodon Dev team for years. Still, their only response is complete nonsense, discriminatory against people with disabilities, and does not show competence to build prospective solutions in the near future.
It is now for the community to step in and fill this gap. If anything, this attack made that very clear and there are already some promising efforts underway.
So, hang on and thanks for being part of this amazing community! 🚀
