Hey trans fedi folks

We think our instance is having a federation or relay issue... or really not many people are using a hashtag.

We're pretty sure more trans people are recording their voice training progress under hashtags like:

#TransVoice #TransVoiceFriday #VoiceTraining etc.

... but whenever we do a search for the hashtag, mostly all we see are the posts on our instance. It seems to be an issue for all hashtags, which might be why directly searching for some doesn't give us many results 😞

We're currently signed up to these relays:

• https://relay.infosec.exchange/inbox
• https://relay.gay/inbox

Are there any specific ones you'd recommend, or should we just add ourselves to some of the biggest ones listed on this Relay List?

Failing that, are there any server side federation tweaks we admin could make ourselves or ask our host (FediMonster) to make? (We're on Glitch-SOC - v4.3.0-alpha.5+glitch.)

Any thoughts and suggestions welcome

#fedi #fediverse #Mastodon #GlitchSOC #AskFedi #federation #relays #HashtagSearch #FediAdmin #trans #transgender #queer #LGBTQ+ #LGBTQIA+ #LGBTQIA2S+

To all Fedi Admins currently being hit with a spam wave:

Defederate from these instances:

[Full List of Affected Instances Here]

Limit first, defederate only in worst situations!

Reconsider re-federating with any of the mentioned instances once the spam is mitigated. The admins of some of these may have just been asleep when this all started.

Ban Spam Accounts via their E-Mail Domain

Block the following E-Mail Domain and whatever temp Mail provider it resolves to: chitthi.in

Just to be safe, block these ones too (same provider)

• mailto.plus
• fexpost.com
• fexbox.org
• mailbox.in.ua
• any.pink

All our spam accounts came from these E-mails.

Since you probably have some of these accounts sleeping:

https://[your-instance.tld]/admin/accounts?email=%25%40chitthi.in there just select all and press “Ban”.

Find Remaining Spammers

I've seen instances that fixed the spam issue but began being hit later again. The spammers might use new E-Mails, so here is a way to find and block them anyway:

https://mamot.fr/@vincib/111946701929274350

IP Bans and TOR

These spammers seem to be using the TOR Network as all of their IPs are TOR Exit Node IPs, hence an idea (with some collateral damage if executed) would be to ban all TOR exit node IPs for sign ups. I am personally against this idea as you'd also prevent users who simply wish to stay anonymous online (political refugees, leakers of important documents, etc.) from using your platform. For now, simply banning every user using a particular Spammer IP will not help and will merely ban users that try to stay anonymous! Not necessarily the spammers.

How To Block All Temp E-Mails in the Future

If you want to prevent this from ever happening again, you should block E-Mails from Temporary Mail providers all together:

• Here is the list of all Temp email providers (there are both blocklist and allowlist)
• Here how to install it in Mastodon
• The script that automatically pulls the list via Cronjob and imports it into Mastodon
• Script template

Because of this, hessen.social, for example, was not affected by the spam attack! They had already banned the email domain the spammers used ages ago.

In future updates on Mastodon, maybe Admins can simply click a button that says “Ban Temp E-Mail Providers” Automagically from the E-Mail Menu? There could be E-Mail categories that can be banned, such as temporary mails.

Why did this happen?

We're probably all looking for answers as to why this spam wave happened to begin with. As much as I do not want to believe this was the real reason hundreds of us spent hours of our day today on mitigating this issue, here is a real explanation on why this spam wave came to be:

Part 1:
https://fedi.fyralabs.com/notes/9psdqurvye
Part 2:
https://fedi.fyralabs.com/notes/9psnooe6p1
Part 3:
https://fedi.fyralabs.com/notes/9pth6oh3xr

As noted, @cappy is working on a full exposé regarding the origin of the February 16th Spam Attacks. I'm patiently awaiting their work's publishing!

Good luck, everyone!
Thanks for participating in the Fediverse Experiment!

#FediBlock #FediAdmin

PSA: It looks like mastodon.social has implemented hCAPTCHA on their signups yesterday.

So, if you have limited / suspended mastodon.social because of the spam issue, you may wish to reconsider this.

This will also likely mean that spammers will move to different instances (already seeing them targeting mastodon.world).

You may wish to consider implementing hCAPTCHA yourself to protect your own instance, and here is the relevant PR:

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/25019

The reason I'm suggesting this, is because if you are a small/medium instance with open registrations, and spammers find and abuse your instance, I imagine that other instances will limit/suspend your instance without hesitation, given how willing some were to limit/suspend the much larger mastodon.social.

But do note this comment on the PR:

“To give some context to people seeing this: this is an emergency feature backport from Glitch SOC to help mitigating an ongoing spam wave, this feature may not make it in a next release, or with significative changes.”

#MastoAdmin #FediAdmin #fediblock

Edited to add: multiple people have rightly commented on the accessibility concerns with hCaptcha: hCaptcha is really really really bad for blind and visually impaired people.

Please have a look at this excellent reply for more details:

https://dragonscave.space/@Mayana/110383119877022255