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 threadM.rauderMay 15, 2023

@renchap @andrew @law
Naïve question: Since posts can be edited and deleted by their authors, wouldn’t it be possible to also retroactively block/delete earlier SPAM posts?

This way you could clean them out of the timeline.

(To address possible abuse by moderators, may want to typically limit rollbacks to certain amount of time, or something.)

Show threadRenaud Chaput
@rauder @andrew @law As far as I understand, a recent code change (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/24852) propagates the fact that an accoukt was suspended to recent mentionned instances, so it should remove those posts quickly.
This will be deployed on mastodon.social very soon.
Change profile updates to be sent to recently-mentioned servers by ClearlyClaire · Pull Request #24852 · mastodon/mastodon

When a local account gets suspended, remote servers that have followers or who have reported the account get notified. But in cases like today's spam wave, the suspended users typically have no fol...

GitHub
May 15, 2023 at 11:11amWeb