There is a human element in the new user signup path on a lot of Masto instances. For a while I had mine set to “there’s a form on the front page to fill out wi

There is a human element in the new user signup path on a lot of Masto instances. For a while I had mine set to “there’s a form on the front page to fill out with an freeform text field to say why you want an account here” until the day a whole bunch of people with suspiciously similar email account names all requested new accounts and filled that space with links to buy viagra and cialis. Now it’s gone back to “ask me elsewhere, or ask a friend who is on the instance, and I will hand off an invite link”. An admin can leave her instance set to open signups, but eventually she’s probably going to turn that off once it grows to a size she starts to feel uncomfortable handling. You could always set up your own instance to spam people, but you’d quickly find the entire instance blocked. There’s a few hashtags where admins tend to share bad actor instances they’ve run across, and you’d start seeing instances you’d never made contact with blocking you preemptively.