Summary: Mastodon has few tools for automatedly fighting spam and abuse so I gave up and made one.

We’ve been swamped with a flood of spam for the last few days. Some loser is creating hundreds or thousands of accounts on undermoderated servers and pestering the whole fediverse with junk. Mastodon itself provides no mechanism for admins to reject statuses that contain certain strings, even though many people have begged for this over the years. And while I could learn enough Ruby on Rails to implement such a feature myself, I’m not confident that it would be accepted into the main project and I don’t want to maintain a fork.

Today I received this email:

From: Victor Coutand

Subject: Questions About CCPA Data Access Process for freeradical.zone

To Whom It May Concern:

My name is Victor Coutand, and I am a resident of Nice, France. I have a few questions about your process for responding to California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) data access requests:

1. Would you process a CCPA data access request from me even though I am not a resident of California?
2. Do you process CCPA data access requests via email, a website, or telephone? If via a website, what is the URL I should go to?
3. What personal information do I have to submit for you to verify and process a CCPA data access request?
4. What information do you provide in response to a CCPA data access request?

To be clear, I am not submitting a data access request at this time. My questions are about your process for when I do submit a request.