Renaud ChaputOct 17, 2024

I would encourage every Fediverse software project to implement a “dead-man switch" on registrations: if nobody with moderator permissions has been active in the last week, then disable new account creation.

The Fediverse has a significant number of abandoned instances that are used by bad actors to create accounts and send spam.

We implemented this in Mastodon (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/29318) and it has been highly effective.

Automatically switch from open to approved registrations in absence of moderators by ClearlyClaire · Pull Request #29318 · mastodon/mastodon

This is not meant to replace #29280, but supplement it to avoid unmonitored servers keeping open registrations indefinitely. Automatically switch away from open registrations if no user with the pe...

GitHub
Show threadLemonheep (Heated From Fire) Oct 17, 2024
@renchap Huh, was this why the recent enspammification a few days ago didn't turn out so effectively?

Aside from that, though, promising work! It's encouraging to see our devs not just be better than Twitter, but build up moderation tools to keep up with the growing userbase (and thus pool of bad actors).
Show threadGunChleoc
@radmin @renchap It was a combination of this and of notifying vulnerable servers during the previous spam wave. Many admins took action on the open signups back then.
Oct 18, 2024 at 7:18amWeb