are any mods on other Instances seeing a small wave of spam-like behaviour in the past few hours, coming from multiple Instances? Sugary stock photos and inspirational posts being posted with pro-Israel political hashtags. #FediBlockMeta
So many #replyguys in this thread lol. OP is not even explicitly saying here that he supports #Threads, he's just pointing out how the #UX of #Mastodon (and frankly the rest of the #fediverse as well) sucks when it comes to communicating clearly to users about instances suspensions. :reimu_sigh:
i can tell you, i personally know Ashten. she is a very kind and caring person who does everything she can to fight bigotry and you try to get different fedi instance admins to work together to try to provide a safer and more fun fediverse for everyone. i know this as im one of the many people who help her with these goals
i don't talk about this much, but im half cuban and a trans woman. i work with many people from many different backgrounds under Ashten's leadership. this includes BIPOC such as people from Japan and even Bangladesh. every one of us have been whitewashed at some point by some bigot who has decided they don't like queer people. especially queer people who stand up for themselves and each other. in that, not all of us are queer, just the fediverse is heavily queer, so this tends to be more common
the point is we exist all across the fediverse and work hard to make the place safer for everyone. it sucks that a small group of people try their hardest to make the place hostile for us and to try to isolate us and drive us into hiding. thankfully we have a lot of support from a lot of different people and we will continue to do everything we can to make this place as safe as possible from bigotry and harassment
if you want to help us protect the fediverse, let us know. we run the Sincerity Alliance and invite people after we have vetted them to be willing and decent people with a genuine interest in protecting the fediverse
#FediBlockMeta
A humble request: If possible, when using the FediBlock hashtag, please include context/receipts. That will make it easier to judge whether the FediBlock suggestion has merit. Thank you 😊
The #fediverse has a serious problem if accounts like @LALegault and @RustyBertrand can get shadow banned from huge servers. They never harass afaik but do post controversial opinions. I don't get why this would ever require server level action to deal with. Or why they shouldn't be notified or listened to when they discover and dispute it. Important voices will never survive pressure campaigns here if we don't establish new norms.
If someone compares Jews to Nazis, the group that killed half the Jews in the world, that is Nazi Inversion, and it's antisemitic. Invoking the Nazis or the Holocaust as so called "rhetorical speech" to talk about the actions of Jews is antisemitic.
It's very clear, it's very simple, and it's not stopping anyone from criticizing anything, because the same argument could be made without Nazi Inversion, and if it couldn't be, then it's not criticism at all, but simply words used to attack, intimidate or in some other way harm Jews.
I'm happy to see that other instances are starting to take Nazi Inversion seriously and act on it when their users engage in hate speech. I strongly encourage all instances who want to stop antisemitism to do the same.
Excessive/confusing moderation policy threatens the growth of the #fediverse. In turn, this threatens the potential for the network to let the public decide what gets attention and how culture evolves, eliminating the stranglehold of big tech, corporate media and the influence of money via advertising. I'm starting to fear this might be intentional.
Server relationships need to be transparent and limitations based on harm to the network, not claims of misinfo or bad opinions. #fediblockmeta
These servers have been silenced as they are still sending spam despite there being a new version to at least allow some protections against this and moderators should have cleaned servers by now.
I will revisit all my silenced servers including below end of the month. Any servers still sending spam will be considered unmoderated/unmaintained and will be permanently blocked. Any new servers spamming March 1st and beyond will suffer the same fate.
The project known as "The Bad Space", connected with the Nivenly Foundation, is still trying to get other servers to block our server. kolektiva.social is listed as having a 60% "heat rating" indicating that 60% of their sites have silenced or suspended it, and is listed as having "Moderation issues, Poor moderation, abusive/harrassment behaviour". The sites that create The Bad Space list are:
The lack of urgency on the spam attacks from @Gargron is really shocking. We’ve been asking for better moderation tooling and ways to plugin spam filters and more for years. Now there’s actual issues most of us are experiencing on smaller servers and they STILL don’t seem to prioritize it at @MastodonEngineering#Fediblockmeta#MastodonAdmin
This instance handles, on average, 6.5 reports of antisemitism a day.
Why is that significant? It's significant because Babka already suspends individual accounts, and Limits entire instances.
Despite this, we deal with ~6.5 new antisemitic accounts per day.
And yet, if we look at the graphs from Fediverse Observer, the number of active users on the Fediverse has gone down!
So what exactly does that mean, if the number of antisemitic accounts continues to grow and the number of active users continues to shrink?
It means that the number of antisemites on the Fediverse is quite large, and what we're seeing isn't new antisemites as much as it is antisemitism being so normalized that people feel comfortable spouting hate, and that despite blocking or silencing thousands of accounts, hate continues to be emboldened.
I am strongly considering moving away from Mastodon in the medium to long term future because of Eugen's absolutely abysmal handling of the spam situation and lack of prioritization of proper mod tooling.
Currently sleeping the sleep of the righteous, @andrew was up way too late building tools to fend off the current wave of fedi spam, playing whack-a-mole with bad accounts, and getting fedi friends up and running with their own blocklists.
I’d like to convene a discussion this week or next to do a mini retro on this attack and some #designthinking work around fedi spam fighting tools. If you’re interested in the discussion, @ me your email or send one to spamretro at hypatia dot ca and I’ll loop you in on it 🙏
Would love to have a proper UR/UX person on the call, I’m a mere amateur at that part 😅
The current spam issue highlights EXACTLY why I made my own server and locked down registration. I don’t have time to actively moderate, anyone on my server I know is pretty chill from dealing with them personally.
If you don’t have the ability to monitor your server 24/7 with a team, don’t leave registration open. Lock it down. Now hundreds of small instances are waking up to headaches cleaning users out or finding they were blocked. #Mastodon#fediblockmeta#cybersecurity#infosec#spam
someone on a Japanese hacker forum decided it was a good idea to spam the entire Fediverse because they wanted to cancel a minor that DDoSed a Discord bot which apparently made them lost millions (what?)
A Discord bot. I can't make this shit up man.
The real culprit seems to be someone who goes by mumei in the ctkpaarr.org forums, whose first post was literally a threat to ap12, that if they don't delete their "Kuroneko Server" Discord bot, they will spam every blog, forum and SNS and cancel him.
This shit is ridiculous.
The ap12 account from mastodon-japan was actually fake, and this dude impersonated a minor to get all of the Fediverse (us) to bully him.
For Sharkey/Misskey users, update to the latest dev for the email domain block feature. Then copy and paste the temporary/disposable email domain list to Blocked Email Domains in Security under Control Panel.
It seems this happens occasionally on #fedi where malicious users decide to take advantage of instances with poor moderation to spam widely.
There are many solutions, but let me offer a simple change that stops spam dead in its tracks:
#nodebb has a post queue built in. If you have 0 reputation, you need your post to be manually approved. You can adjust this as needed, but even the default (allow regular posting after 1 upvote) is sufficient. Stops 👏spam 👏 cold 👏.
Today's attack proved that the Fediverse is unfortunate pretty vulnerable even to just a skid (or maybe OP who warned the skid).
The cause of the attack includes:
insufficient moderation on some servers allowing mass account creation.
no good methods to filter out even just a keyword for an entire instance.
Even though most of us survived the first wave, we have to prepare for the second and future ones:
Servers should enable the equivalent feature in their software that enables moderators to check if an account is ok first before letting them post anything.
Mastodon, Misskey and major software should implement a regex filter that ignores posts from any instances.