A recent surge in spam attacks on decentralized social network sites, known as the fediverse, has impacted popular platforms like Mastodon.
Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko confirmed an attack, urging server admins to switch registrations to approval mode and to block disposable email addresses to counter the onslaught of spam accounts.
This attack in particular targets smaller and even abandoned Mastodon servers with open registrations, unlike previous incidents where large servers like Mastodon.social had been attacked.
Mastodon targeted by spam accounts
The decentralized nature of the fediverse, which allows technical experts to run their own servers, has revealed a number of vulnerabilities that are not typically so prevalent across mainstream social networking platforms.
That being said, X (formerly Twitter) has been battling with spam and bot accounts for a long time, with ex-CEO and owner Elon Musk hinting at payable accounts with a nominal charge in order to prevent fakes.
Mastodon app Ivory has released an emergency update featuring a custom “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 for improve spam and abuse-fighting features, promising enhancements that could take months.
In the meantime, he added: “Another measure we took today is switching the setting for new instances so they are not wide-open by default, and added a banner to remind admins that fully open instances need to be actively moderated, so this needs to be a careful decision by the admin.”
Mastodon usage continues to be a very niche area of online networking, and despite hitting around 1.8 million users at the height of the controversy surrounding X, its number of users has now dropped to around one million.
Via TechCrunch
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