Spammers have been programmatically creating accounts on Mastodon instances for years. Sometimes they post once and never again, sometimes they post on a schedule. Sometimes they never post, like a waiting botnet.
As Mastodon's anti-spam solutions are effectively nonexistent, most instances in our network require manual approval of new accounts. Up until recently, it was easy to spot a spammer; their join reasons were generic.
ChatGPT spammers have now arrived.
Besides the logic of inspecting username against email, the join reason statement structure and content, etc- are there external tools you use to vet users?
Example: I use arin.net to check the IP address of a prospective user. Is the IP block registered to a datacenter, or an ISP? If it's an ISP, I'll check the origin country against the interface language for a match.
What have y'all had luck with?
@welshpixie @mawr Trusting your feeling will definitely help to keep out those robot accounts that try really hard to mimick humans. Sometimes a thing just doesn't feel right.
The German word "Gut" means "Good" and is pronounced like the English good! It is powerful and your gut feeling is what makes you human and therefore distinctively different from a robot.
✨Soff✨ Mawr 
Calligrafae
Zalasur 🇺🇦
Frank Heijkamp