Technology

I'm gonna take this opportunity to mention LemmyAutomod, for Lemmy instance admins.

This massive spam attack was unrelenting, but it came in the form of a large number of spam posts that had a small amount of variation. Using the above tool, it really helped to catch most of the spam within seconds or minutes of being posted.

The dev is really helpful, which is good because I needed some hand-holding, but it has been a fantastic tool with this latest spam wave being the first true test of it. When the spammers started posting images of URLs instead of links, the dev added functionality to detect images that were the same or similar to a reference image.

In addition, there's also a Lemmy spam defense Matrix chat set up by Lemmy.world where instance admins post spam accounts so others can ban them on their own instances (and add them to their automod).

These are legitimate challenges that activitypub faces. I’m glad that they’re popping up like this so they can be observed, mitigated and planned for in the future.

So I assume this attack was reported by the perpetrators, as spam on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit are far far worse problems.

On Fosstodon I didn't see a single spam message, the only reason I learned there was a spam attack was through people complaining about it. I guess it comes down to selecting an instance with good moderation

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Over the past several days, attackers have targeted smaller Mastodon servers, taking advantage of open registrations to automate the creation of spam accounts.

While this is not the first spam attack that has impacted the Fediverse, Rochko notes that only larger servers like Mastodon.social had been targeted previously.

What’s different this time is that the spammers targeted the smaller and even abandoned servers offering open registration, allowing the bad actors to quickly create accounts and generate spam.

Because Mastodon’s smaller servers are often hobbyist projects run by enthusiasts they were vulnerable to this sort of attack.

Many servers were simply shut off as their admins decided it would be easiest to wait out the attack or abandon Mastodon altogether.

“At the moment, there are no good built-in tools to handle this, as this is a complex issue — federated networks are not easy!

The original article contains 1,023 words, the summary contains 143 words. Saved 86%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Mastodon and friends are built as open conduits with very little in the way of safety or permissions. Spam should be expected.

It's not a Fediverse vulnerability. It's a Mastodon vulnerability. Don't want spam? Use a better fediverse technology.

Which countries are these spams coming from?

I haven’t seen any spam ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Deleted. I dumb.