Mastodon is being hit by an increasing number of spam attacks β and there appears to be no solution in the short term
A recent wave of spam attacks on decentralized social networking sites known as the Fediverse has impacted popular platforms like Mastodon.
Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko confirmed an attack and urged server administrators to put registrations in approval mode and block disposable email addresses to counter the onslaught of spam accounts.
This attack mainly targets smaller and even abandoned Mastodon servers with open registrations, unlike previous incidents where large servers such as Mastodon.social were attacked.
Mastodon targeted by spam accounts
The decentralized nature of the fediverse, which allows tech experts to manage their own servers, has exposed a number of vulnerabilities that are typically not as common on mainstream social networking platforms.
That said, X (formerly Twitter) has long struggled with spam and bot accounts, with ex-CEO and owner Elon Musk hinting at affordable accounts with a nominal fee to prevent counterfeits.
Mastodon app Ivory has released an emergency update with a modified ‘Potential Spam’ filter to help users mute spam mentions in light of what it describes as a ‘recent influx of spam on Mastodon’.
Renaud Chaput, Mastodon’s CTO, has also acknowledged the need to improve anti-spam and abuse features, promising improvements that could take months.
In the meantime, he added: βAnother measure we took today is changing the setting for new instances so that they are not wide open by default, and adding a banner to remind administrators that fully open instances must be actively moderated, so this must be a careful decision by the administrator.β
Using Mastodon remains a very niche area of ββonline networking, and despite reaching around 1.8 million users at the height of the X controversy, the number of users has now fallen to around a million.
Through TechCrunch