Home | Notifications | New Note | Local | Federated | Search | Logout
Note Detail
Elena Rossini ⁂@_elena@mastodon.social (2026-07-10 20:48:00)
Wondering if the fediverse - and Mastodon in particular - is undergoing a major spam / bot signup wave at the moment.
I'm noticing an uptick in people following me who have weird usernames (lots of numbers), no profile photo, and 0 followers - I'd say 90% of new followers from the past week or two. (Disclaimer: I don't like the word "follower", it sounds cultish)
What gives?
Treasuring the human connections I've made here and this is a bit unsettling TBH.
I may turn on manual approvals 🥲
---Reply---
Elena Rossini ⁂@_elena@mastodon.social (2026-07-10 21:07:55)
An update: I wonder if #agenticAI has anything to do with the uptick in suspicious, bot-like accounts that have been following me lately.
One such follower had picked as username "agent_test".
I like that I can manually remove them. I guess I'll need to go on a cleanup spree soon 🥲
And yes I turned on manual approvals...
---Attachments---
image: https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/895/591/406/424/351/original/6b97a1fd024e324b.png
Reply
---Replies---
Renaud Chaput@renchap@oisaur.com (2026-07-10 21:10:38)
@_elena it’s not new, it’s getting worse, and there is no real good way to detect this without impacting potential real users. It becomes easier when they start to spam, but when someone signs up you have, at best, an IP address (which is most often a random ISP somewhere in the world through a proxy/botnet) and an email address (recently, often from outlook.com). If you start mass-actikg on this you will very likely block real humans.