This updates my last blog post where I said that we’re getting a flood of spambots. Summary: if you’re an admin affected by this, you must act now. I’ll cut to the chase. It seems that this week’s collection of spammer registrations come from Russia. I think that the spam they’re sending today is a probe to see who will respond to it. My prediction is that instances who don’t act quickly will see those accounts stop posting and drawing attention to themselves.

Admins of Mastodon: I’ve deleted four bot accounts that were spamming movie streaming links, with captions like: Tickling Giants Film Gomovies Super Streaming keine Anmeldung putlockers Kostenloser Stream Attack on Titan Season 3 tamilisch Ganzer Film Youtube Ohne Anmeldung Sonnenfilme Movie The Insanity of God Film complet 720px pas de login Youtube putlockers Movie Stream Little Shop of Horrors: The Director’s Cut 123movies Without Signing Up Watch Here putlockers in Hindi En el Septimo Dia (On the Seventh Day) Regarder gratuitement double audio en hindi gostream gomovies pas d’inscription Not on my instance.

One of my users complained that they received spam from @mastodon_user_matching@2.distsn.org, whose timeline currently looks like: It turns out this whole instance is screaming with spam red flags: It doesn’t verify email addresses1, The site that the spambot is advertising, MastodonUserMatching.tk, is a redirect to vinayaka.distsn.org (which is on the same domain as the Mastodon instance2), and The bot’s source has the same name (“vinayaka”) as the subdomain it’s spamming ads for.