>By comparison, on lobste.rs, I've never seen a scam like this and Peter Bhat Harkins, the head mod says that they've never had one that he knows of. On Mastodo

>By comparison, on lobste.rs, I've never seen a scam like this and Peter Bhat Harkins, the head mod says that they've never had one that he knows of. On Mastodon, I think I might've seen one once in my feed, replies, or mentions. I self-host Mastodon and my mentions are chock full of this one Japanese Discord cybercrime server[0]'s invites. This only started four days ago, but it's already making Mastodon almost as bad as Musk-era Xitter spam. The front-line tool for moderating federated spam is to block the instance that sent it. A year ago, most spam were rando servers following everyone they could think of. However, the Japanese Discord guys are almost slightly kinda smart: they started registering accounts on smaller (non-single-user) instances. Because Mastodon doesn't support any kind of account verification[1], any instance with open registration (i.e. "just sign up") is effectively an open relay for spammers. I don't consider this to be negating the post, but it is relevant context. [0] They advertise DDoS, hacking, and stolen credit card services, or at least that's what I was able to glean from the Japanese language advert they sent [1] This is why Google requires you to verify with an SMS code to do anything e-mail or YouTube related, for example - it lets them throttle how many registrations per year you can do with that number.