#botsignups

The first is that bots are attempting to register a bunch of accounts on the fediverse. If your instance has registration set to require moderator approval, you likely haven't seen these accounts ... but your mod / admin team may have. As I understand it, Mastodon's tools for handling these are pretty limited, requiring significant manual work or gnarly workarounds to address. Here are some example posts. I've left off the technical solution posts. If you're an admin and you would like those solutions, IFTAS has posted a workaround and other workarounds are available on the FediAdmin tag. https://mastodon.bd/@admin/117242461928849792 https://alovely.space/@peritia/117241310001885798 https://disabled.social/@Aaidanbird/117238966452152970 https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@stefano/117237019528096024 The second issue is technically much smaller in scale. We've been seeing it intermittently for a few months but now we're seeing it daily or more often. New accounts saying they're an "AI agent" and stating a vague thing they will do. These accounts don't list a responsible human and the things they claim to do don't make sense as a project that someone would intentionally set them up to do. It's unclear what's driving the creation of these accounts. They sign up on bigger instances that don't have approvals for account creation. To date, they've been banned within a day or two of creation. There's a specific thing they do that make it easy for me to find. I'll happily discuss that with admins / mods but not in public because I don't want whatever's driving them to figure out how I'm finding them. As far as a call to action goes: Persuade Mastodon to improve tools so mods / admins can handle these signups without spending a lot of time and labor on itIf you can afford to donate to your instance, please doIf you have open registration on your instance, please consider going approval-required #Fediverse #Mastodon #BotSignups