The following instances that were previously spamming have upgraded to Mastodon 4.2.8 (which stops open sign ups when the instance is not maintained). They are probably safe to unblock if you have them blocked
All of these servers are vectors for an ongoing spam attack. Despite me giving them ample time to respond to reports, they refuse to respond. They show no inclination to moderate, and no action has been taken by them whatsoever.
In all cases, these are abandoned servers with open registrations. It is likely they will continue to be used for sending spam across the Fediverse.
@atomicpoet@cliffwade Have you seen that mastodon.de is maintaining a blocklist too? If you are looking to keep on top of the #FediSpam, it might be interesting for you.
#UnpopularOpinion The current spam wave supports one of my suspicions that federated networks should be built as a web of trust, Friends of a Friend style. Open registrations invite abuse and there's only so much algorithmic stuff you can throw at that. An invitation based system is also not a perfect solution as it creates artificial scarcity. A solution somewhere in-between is needed but I am still pondering how that could look like. Will continue my thoughts as a thread starting here.
@jwildeboer I believe the combination of web of trust with smaller instances is probably the most effective approach.
Moderation does not scale well, not even when automated (ask commercial social networks).
Web of trust is effective on smaller networks only (I mean when each node vouches for a small group of people they know well, like in real life).
I believe that was ultimately the whole point of being descentralised after all.
I can believe that a bit larger cooperative commons model could work, where there is a community of users and a democratic governance model, which ultimately implies that the people in the instance really know each other.
I have my doubts about the super-large instances ran as an enterprise. They may not be the origin of the spam (like in the last few days), but they were the medium of propagation. 🤔
I am curious about the lessons learned over the last few days.
It's really great to discover so many new instances that I have never heard of before, but a bit disappointing to see how many of them are Open Registration and abandoned, leaving them subject to spam bots.
About 1 in every 5 accounts that oslo.town encounters seems to be a proactive spam bot now. It’s ridiculous.
(I say "proactive" spam bot because I imagine there are many more, but the passive ones don't @mention people)
Interesting, looks like a spammer is targeting .social email addresses. I got a message inviting me to join the "Montereybay Masterplan" project, and the link in the email leads to a phishing site with a truly unconvincing Mastodon logo. It is to laugh... #FediSpam
Pixelfed's Advanced Autospam system uses a statistical method called Bayesian inference to detect spam in comments and captions. When the system is being set up, it is trained on a dataset of known spam and non-spam posts.
During this training process, the captions are broken up into individual words (or tokens), and then counted and sorted into the appropriate category (spam or non-spam). This creates a database of weights that the system uses to identify spammy words and phrases.
When the system encounters a new comment or caption, it calculates the weight of each token in the comment, and then compares that weight to the known weights of spammy and non-spammy tokens. Based on this comparison and the weights of the tokens in the comment, the system can predict whether the comment/caption is likely to be spam or not.
By updating its database of spammy tokens over time and adapting to new information, the autospam detection system can become better and better at identifying spam and keeping Pixelfed community free of unwanted content.
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We wanted to give you a heads up that we have turned on an automated spam detection system to keep our community safe and free of unwanted spam. This will help us maintain a high-quality experience for all of our members.
If you're a new member, don't worry! You can still post freely, but your posts may be temporarily unlisted until we can review them and ensure they aren't spam. We'll do our best to approve your posts as quickly as possible so they can be seen by the community.
We appreciate your cooperation and understanding as we work to keep NixOrigin spam-free. Thank you for being a part of our lovely and friendly community! 🤗