I thought we had mostly avoided the Mastodon spam from the last couple of days, but it must’ve hit some users because there were a bunch of extra spam reports. I continue to have mixed feelings about how Mastodon handles private messages. Need to rethink Micro.blog’s implementation.

S Koren

most of the spam that hit yesterday at least to me where from accounts with no posts, followers or followings. Burn-accounts. Also to multiple recipients per post. Not sure that helps you.

Miguel Manalo

@manton I didn’t even know mastodon had DMs. Or I just assumed they weren’t actually private?

Manton Reece

@Archimage It does help. I think we should detect that and ignore those messages, although spammers could do a better job of creating fake accounts too.

Manton Reece

@miguel Yeah, they aren't exactly DMs, more like private mentions. They aren't encrypted and they are readable to anyone running your Mastodon server, for example.

Miguel Manalo

@manton ah gotcha. They’re just more like… non-public posts with me and one other user and the server admin

S Koren

glad i was able to help. Also may want to pass it through a spam filter looking for things like onlyfans in the body, which is what all the spam was pushing.

Sean C.

@manton my spam DM on Mastodon is far less than i ever experinced on #ElmosFolly

Manton Reece @manton
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