On instagram, which I only use these days to follow friends who are on there, the most frequent "notification" is from obvious spam (presumably phishing) accounts. Meta has thus far been unable to stem the never-ending flow.
Except these accounts are all brand new. I don't know anyone who's not on instagram in 2024 that will decide to sign up and follow me
If Instagram had a flag that said "don't let new accounts follow me", it would stop the spam dead.
@blaine LinkedIn is a bit special in this regard – there one can require people to know ones e-mail address to be allowed to add
Would be nice to experiment in the Fediverse / IndieWeb with models like “only people I follow and the people they follow may request to follow me” – finally we can actually do such experiments!
Obviously, as a growing network, way more people are setting up new accounts on the Fediverse than on Instagram, so "new" would need to be a bit more nuanced, but having an auto-reply that says "hey, if you want to follow this personal account, that's cool, just ping me out-of-band and I'll follow you first."
We could even have a "force-follow" button that makes an attestation that you're not spam/a bot/etc. Spammers that use that mechanism get their server banned. Idk?
@blaine there's a setting in mastodon.social's notifications tab now that allows you to block DMs from accounts created less than 30 days ago, so they're moving in the direction of being able to do this.
Add comment