Modblurt of the moment:
There's another uptick in "spam" going on, particularly with begposts for GFM donations or mutual aid. These are really hard to pre-empt, as most reasonably moderated servers remain reluctant to outright forbid mutual aid requests.
It's also been noticed by instance admins that the people running these scams are now creating waves of new accounts and immediately blocking their own instance admins, and any others they can think of.
Please keep reporting these.
Blocking the admins/mods means we won't seem them as they just float by in timelines, BUT it does not hide reports about them. Please let admins (particularly the hosting admins!) know when you come across these.
And as always - do not interact, and please do not donate to anything you cannot verify OFF of social media is a legitimate cause.
@datum @proprietor I was thinking the same thing: Why should instance admins be blockable? Fediverse servers are all much smaller and more independent, and migration/portability means you can (with some limitations and space for improvement) move to a place where you don't hate the owners.
There's probably space for muting an admin, but it still seems like a thing that is more a result of not investing time/thought into the thing than intentional choices.
@drsbaitso @proprietor mute an admin makes sense - maybe some admin is particularly verbose and a user doesn't have the time for it, fine.
But blocked so the admin has to (trivially) sidestep? Hm.
@datum @drsbaitso When it comes to those whose motivation for opening accounts is to abuse others/the system, though, every incremental obstacle they throw between their spam firehose and someone stopping their spam firehose buys them a bit more time to be abusers, and if extra minutes of spamming the TL adds 0.001% to their return rate, then it shows on their metrics and is worth it.
The solution in our case - and many small-mid instances - is to NOT have completely barrier-free sign-ups.
@datum @drsbaitso The large instances who DO allow open sign-ups with secondary moderation are not making an illegitimate choice in that, but they need to do so making sure they acknowledge and manage that this creates a vulnerability for them, and for anyone else who federates with them.
Mastodon acknowledges and manages this, at least, though the math works out at such a scale that we still encounter dozens or hundreds of abuse accounts before they're caught.
The solution in our case - and many small-mid instances - is to NOT have completely barrier-free sign-ups.
I feel like this is very good, too. Zeroes.ca has a "write why you want to join" step that's not amenable to automating the creating of accounts.
@datum A good proposal, but alas, I AM primarily a community admin, and neither qualified nor with the time to become a Mastodon developer for free .... 😆
I know there are folks working on different moderator tools in many different ways.
It's also the case that many moderators are just folks' own accounts with some elevated privileges, like access to the reports for the instance. Otherwise, though - if people block us, they can, that's their choice. I find it questionable, but not my say.
Managing Barista and Janitor
datum (n=1)
Cassander