Andrew LeaheyMay 14, 2023

I think it may be time to start discussing how much longer we can onesie-twosie deal with spam from mastodon.social.

#lawfedi and #lawyer or #legal adjacent folks that haven't hopped to a smaller instance and are still on the main one, please consider making a move. We've had more spam reports today than in the last 6 months combined.

It doesn't have to be to https://esq.social if you don't want to, but we'd of course be happy to have you.

@law #mastoadmin

esq.social

A Mastodon instance for legal professionals and folks in law-adjacent fields. We abide by the Mastodon Server Covenant, available at https://joinmastodon.org/covenant

Mastodon hosted on esq.social
Show threadAndrew LeaheyMay 14, 2023

@law

Just to be clear, if we can avoid defederating from mastodon.social by any stretch we absolutely will. It is the biggest player by a large margin.

That said, the possibility of it happening at some point in the future is certainly more likely today than it was yesterday.

#lawfedi

Show threadRenaud ChaputMay 15, 2023
@andrew @law We (mastodon.social) blocked this spammer less than 15 minutes after they started. Reports continued flowing for hours after than when users saw the messages, but our response has been very quick.
We are also working on more tools to prevent this to happen (not for mastodon.social, but for every server).
I am really sorry this is happening.
Show threadTroed Sångberg

@renchap @andrew You did great. I (co-moderating a large infosec instance) saw the spam attack as it started and immediately went to work identifying a suitable query where I could mass-suspend the accounts. When I had done that I realized that the attack was ongoing and the instance kept seeing new accounts as I refreshed. After just a few minutes the new accounts stopped appearing at which point I knew you had cut them off.

All in all we got ~10 reports or so at the time and some time after when people saw the messages.

I know of _no_ centralized service able to react this quickly.

/ex global Head of commercial SaaS

edit: removed an automatic re-boost tag. Sorry, it came with the thread and I didn't understand what it was.

May 15, 2023 at 10:47amWeb