The long story short with the Mastodon spam woes this weekend is it’s a deliberate attack exploiting Fediverse and Mastodon issues.

They’re using Tor exit nodes and everything is automated. I think they can just keep running it, as there is no barrier to stop them.

To keep it in perspective, though, I don’t think it’s a big deal at present. People should just ignore it.

There is a bunch of technical issues it highlights, which is that Fediverse is very open to abuse at present. There’s no spam filtering at all. It’s like email from 1996. It’s wide open to abuse.

IMHO Mastodon admins should enable CAPTCHA for registration - it’s supported out of the box - if they run open sign ups.

Ideally Mastodon would add easy install third party plugins (a la Wordpress etc) so people could develop optional plugins for anti-spam and anti-malware.

Now, it does become a bigger problem if the current spammers publish their source code and more join in.

There’s absolutely no effective controls to stop it - here is the Wild West still - so the elephant is the room is anybody can flip the table at present.

The good news is much of the anti spam and anti phish technologies over the years (Real time Block Lists etc) can be reworked for here. The bad news is that’s a long way off realistically.

Another knock on impact from the spam run - the pictures of spam in the posts are chewing up disk space if file system without deduping is used, and there’s extra Sidekiq load (it’s the biggest Saturday ever on cyberplace.social).

Also a bunch of instances have gone to failing in federation admin page, presumably because smaller instance admins got annoyed and switched them off.