We require an email address and a response to a question on our signups. The response doesn’t need to be more than about 5 words, it’s just to stop bots putting random characters or single words in there.
So far, it has seemed to ride that balance between low bar of entry and too hard to spam with bot applicants.
That said, if I wanted to spam the Fediverse, I’d just spin up my own instance of Lemmy or Mastodon.
That said, if I wanted to spam the Fediverse, I’d just spin up my own instance of Lemmy or Mastodon.
Its actually smarter for spammers to infiltrate populated servers. Admins aren’t going to have a problem defederating from a pure spam instance. They’ll think twice about defederating from an instance with lots of legit users.
From what I can tell, all the spam is originating from Mastodon servers running ancient versions with only one original user that stopped posting a few years ago. There are a lot of Mastodon servers just hanging out there, effectively being free replacements for temporary servers set up for spamming.
I’ve started defederating from spamming servers because banning accounts doesn’t help. So far it seems to work, but no doubt there will be another wave of spam at some point.
We require an email address and a response to a question on our signups. The response doesn’t need to be more than about 5 words, it’s just to stop bots putting random characters or single words in there.
So far, it has seemed to ride that balance between low bar of entry and too hard to spam with bot applicants.
That said, if I wanted to spam the Fediverse, I’d just spin up my own instance of Lemmy or Mastodon.
Its actually smarter for spammers to infiltrate populated servers. Admins aren’t going to have a problem defederating from a pure spam instance. They’ll think twice about defederating from an instance with lots of legit users.
From what I can tell, all the spam is originating from Mastodon servers running ancient versions with only one original user that stopped posting a few years ago. There are a lot of Mastodon servers just hanging out there, effectively being free replacements for temporary servers set up for spamming.
I’ve started defederating from spamming servers because banning accounts doesn’t help. So far it seems to work, but no doubt there will be another wave of spam at some point.